back to article Mozilla releases final Firefox 3.5 beta

Mozilla pushed a fourth beta of Firefox 3.5, formerly known as Firefox 3.1, out the door yesterday. The oft-delayed next version of the open source browser is expected to arrive at some point in the first half of this year, it had originally been pencilled in to rock up in December 2008. However, a series of problems brought …


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  1. OneTwoThreeFour
    Thumb Down

    Firefox needs improvement

    I hope they manage to improve reliability and speed as Firefox 3 crashes consistently for me and is extremely slow compared to earlier versions. I can't use it on my netbook as it's too slow.It also seems to update continually and find addon updates every few days which is extremely irritating - open source software seems to have far more updates than Microsoft, not to mention Linux versions change completely every few months! (I'll leave the rant about how useless Linux is on the desktop unless it's provided pre-installed to another day.)

    Firefox is also getting too complicated IMO - part of its charm at first was being simple, quick and reliable. Maybe they should make a "lite" version with all the new things stripped out.

  2. johnB
    Thumb Down

    What about the CPU load ?

    I've given up with FF - on my trusty lappy it runs the CPU @ 100% & the fan is constantly cutting in out to keep the temp down.

    Mozilla don't seem to mention this so I assume no change then ?

    Until the address this, I'm sticking with the no-trouble, reliable IE8.


  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Lasted less than 30 seconds yet again...

    Still no option to disable the awesomely crap URL bar, uninstalled.

  4. jake Silver badge

    In other news

    Firefox 3.0 has an update today, too ... Do your local sysadmin a favo(u)r and pointy-clicky up the update to 3.0.10 ... This advice brought to you by the letter F and the number 10 ...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Yes, but

    I'm not using it until they give an option to disable the crap URL bar it has. I couldn't care less about porn mode, I'm the only person who uses my computer, and I don't know anyone who would care anyway (not to mention that if they were on my PC, they could just look at the large amount of pron on the HDDs...)

  6. Anonymous Coward


    Please do not feed the trolls

  7. BlueGreen

    @OneTwoThreeFour , @johnB


    don't apply the updates.

    It's crashed once for me in the past year. <shrug>

    As for simplicity, I'm perhaps with you there. Trouble is drossy websites full of RIA crud. Companies just can't seem to stop themselves.

    @johnB. Just doesn't happen with me. Have you tried disabling flash, which seems the main bandwidth/cpu hog? The side-effect of advert-free, flicker-free, fast-loading pages is a plus.

    FTR IMO FF FTW. I'm sticking with it.

  8. MacroRodent Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    @AC (re Lasted less than 30 seconds yet again... )

    > Still no option to disable the awesomely crap URL bar, uninstalled.

    I too though it stupid at first, but persevered in using FF 3 and started to see the point: When you use FF3 for long enough, it "learns" and the URL bar offers smart completions to the destinations you usually visit, based on typing a few characters.

    In other words, to appreciate it you have to use it for some time. Of course it was stupid of Mozilla to include a feature that needs more than the attention span of a banana fly to make use of, given today's user base.

    Also wonder about the stability comments. Yes it sometimes crashes, but no more often than competing browsers, and less than some. The only bad thing I find about FF3 is being slow. Certainly more a resource hog than FF2 was. But you don't notice it on modern desktops with Core 2 Duo and gigs of core, only on older systems.

  9. Mark Aggleton
    Thumb Down


    No, Fartfux has some more security issues and has a 'new version' rather than patches....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward


    Do you really mean "do your sysadmin a favour by installing untested software onto your workstation?"

    (Not that you should be able to, obviously...)

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns


    Wow! Microsoft Koolaiders and shillers out in force this morning!! FUD it up boys!!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why the hate?

    For the people having crashing problems and "100% CPU usage" there is obviously other things wrong I have had this before with broken extensions. I've been using firefox 3.1 beta 1 from when it came out and have only had it crash once, and that is with extensions that are not suposedly compatable with it installed.

    Maybe try removing all extensions or just delete your profile directory and try again, and can almost certainly bet that would fix it, if not it's probably a plugin like Flash or something.

    And for all the people who say it's now become too bulky, the whole point of firefox (Pheonix) originally was a lite version of Mozilla where only commonly used features are retained, and other features are available through extensions. So a lite version of a lite browser would make no sense :/.

  13. Bela Lubkin
    Paris Hilton

    FF stability



    My Windows XP SP2 box at work got upgraded to SP3 last week.


    Well, it had been asking me to reboot for a while, but I didn't want to disturb my Opera session. I had over 200 tabs open, across 2 windows, and it hadn't crashed since last August.

    When it finally did crash, I took the opportunity to update Windows, Opera, Adobe Reader, and a dozen other whiny little annoyances that had been after me for months.

    BTW, both Firefox and IE had crashed numerous times during that same period. I've never been able to get FF over about 50 tabs before it loses its mind; sometimes it doesn't even require 2 tabs to take it down.

    (Before you ask: yes, it's an even bigger miracle that XP stayed up for that long. I have no explanation.)

    The Opera crash came the same day that my company's IT department informed me my box had the Conficker worm. So I was going to have to reboot anyway, then Opera crashed to make it more convenient. Maybe the worm caused the crash.

    Of course once I was done upgrading everything in sight, Opera came back up with the same 200 tabs in good order.

    This was also the first time in 30+ years of computing that I've ever had a virus or worm. I really didn't want to break that run...

    Paris because, well, everybody's doing it....

  14. Anonymous Coward

    Don't get hot and bothered

    What's your problem? I use FF everyday all day for everything imaginable. I can not ever remember it crashing. And when I do use IE/Chrome/Safari it's just like FF - you type in an url and up pops a web page. It's just a browser. Maybe I should spend more time faffing with the buttons and menu options and less time on the actual content it renders. It amuses me no end that the browser manufacturers believe that the vast majority of punters do anything more than type queries into Google search and click on the results.

  15. The BigYin
    Thumb Up

    FF stability

    FF crashes for me about once a week. Thing is, I am not sure it actually is FF per se that is crashing. Almost all the sites that cause it to die run flash (YouTube is a big culprit) so I would probably lay the blame squarely at Adobe. Oddly though, FF is much more stable on *nix for me, it's not crashed there once that I can recall.

    The other option is a dodgy add-on (it's quite common that they are not coded well).

    So if you are experiencing instability, get rid of yer add-ons and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then add them back one at a time and figure out which add-on is the issue. Then complain to the author of *that*.

    This is not an issue with IE as it does not support add-ons (well, it does, but they are a total shit to write) and only a moron would stick with IE anyway.

    Can't comment on Opera as I do not use it.

  16. Baldychap

    'Crap URL Bar'

    What? I honesty can't see how this is crap. I type a few letters, even if they are not actually in the URL, and firefox shows me the page I want. pretty much all my regular pages can be accessed in three or so letters. I haven't had to set up bookmarks or anything. It just works.

    IMHO - Awesome.

  17. The BigYin

    @Bela Lubkin

    So your Opera session is more important the corporate security policy? Jesus. If I acted like that I'd be up for the sack, or a written warning at least.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone who gets it


    Yes! The original lure of Firefox was that it was a stripped down basic browser with the ability to add what you wanted to it by plugins.

    Now it's turned into a bloat-fest, stuffed full of "useful" features that I neither want nor need.

    A "Firefox Light" version would be much appreciated. They could even make XPIs of all the integrated features, in case the users only wanted a few of them.

    That would be awesome...

  19. bob
    Thumb Up

    great article

    one handed brousing- you owe me a new keyboard

    also- the awsome bar is great- needs some improvements tho- and i understand that some stick in the muds want to use a old fassioned one.

    wget/ff ftw

  20. Paul Donnelly

    Blooody update

    I let firefox merrily update itself yesterday, and lost my browsing history and cookies for my trouble. It took the next four hours to get my GemCraft Zero savegame (in a cookie) back up to near where I was. Fine, update my software, but LEAVE MY DATA OUT OF IT.

    FFS. Phorm, the govt, ISP's, supermarkets, nightclubs, and now firefox.... Where does it end? Why cant everyone just stop nosing into and pissing around with things that do not concern them unless I decide they do?

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh good.

    "It comes loaded with performance, web compatibility and speed improvements, according to Mozilla."

    So FF 3.5 is just a rebadged FF 2 then? IMHO FF3 was a massive step backwards, all the FF fanbois can kick off at that if they want, but I'm enitled to that opinion. It definitley seemed to be a case of trying to do a Microsoft.

    Or will 3,5 be a case of them going back to the old days of copying Opera?

  22. OneTwoThreeFour

    Good point

    Thanks for the helpful comments - I do have AdBlock installed (which also merrily updates itself frequently) and NoScript and I think some crashes are from Adobe Acrobat, but also some are from Firefox itself. I think I'll uninstall the addons and see if it helps. The thing is I didn't have many crashes until 3; 2 rarely crashed, but point taken that maybe it's not all FF's fault.

    But still a new FF3 installation is unusable on my Aspire netbook (Linux) as it's slllloooow.

    I would also like the option to revert Firefox's tab bar back to FF1 style (to get rid of the scrolling buttons and have tabs shrink infinitely small), you can hack it but the behaviour is not quite as nice. (But I wouldn't want to stand in the way of progress ;) ).

    I might try Opera also, I did download it after a few crashes but didn't get around to trying it.

    If Firefox keeps getting more bloated, I'm sure someone will make a Firefox Lite, otherwise in true open-source way we could try and make it ourselves!

    Anyway thanks guys!

  23. Bela Lubkin

    A title: ``is required''

    "So your Opera session is more important the corporate security policy?"

    As soon as I was informed that I had the worm, I stopped everything and dealt with it. I don't believe I've ever been informed of a "reboot Windows when it asks you to" corporate security policy; though now that you mention it, I see that it's probably a good idea.

    Feh. My mistake was not instantly wiping XP when they first handed me my desktop machine. Now I have data and configuration stuff embedded there, making it harder to switch to something good. I should at least P2V it and slip something else underneath.

    Time fleets...

  24. Greg K Nicholson
    Dead Vulture

    Hang on

    It wasn't the show-stopping bugs that prompted the change of version number—it was the scale of the user-facing improvements made since 3.0. Same thing happened with 1.5.

    Also, you should know by now that a link whose text is “here” should lead to “here”. A link going to Mozilla's website should be labelled “Mozilla's website”. I can hear Tim B-L crying from here (and I don't mean Mozilla's website).

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