Comments on: Firefox 3 hits beta

By: Zeek

Zeek — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 06:26:26 +0000

I was quite enjoying the new features at work – everything was flawless from the start for me.

Then I got to the home PC and it all fell apart.

I’m guessing the SQL stuff for the Bookmarks, History, etc is not working because not only can I not load bookmarks, or view my history, but I can’t even press the back or forward buttons. Good grief.

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:44:55 +0000

Wow, we’re famous! Thanks for the update, Asa.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:52:04 +0000

Steven Fisher,

I think we’ve got to the root of the problem that you and some other Firefox 3 Beta 1 testers are seeing.

Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports, like yours, of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.

What’s going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery and malware lists — the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing and Attack sites. If the profile has very outdated or no local lists, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down these rather large lists in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.

This problem is due to the change in the “SafeBrowsing Protocol” which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you’re on Firefox 2, this isn’t going to affect you.

The work-around for this problem was for us to throttle it on the server side. We’ve done that and if you try Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, it should be fine.

- A

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:27:37 +0000

I know, it’s tragic. When I get 10.5 installed, I’ll be trying out Safari 3 with its new Web Inspector, which might be competitive. We’ll see.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:11:59 +0000

Broken Firebug?

*cries*

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:54:55 +0000

It takes about 3 or 4 seconds to launch on my machine (not that I close it, generally.) The scrolling thing is really weird though – I noticed it too. It seems that the scrolling decelerates when you get to the top or bottom, rather than stopping abruptly. It bothered me at first too, I’m not sure why they did that.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:38:48 +0000

Sigh. It’s amazing that all these years later, Firefox is so fundamentally broken on the Mac. It seems like Mozilla has implemented (for instance) their own custom algorithm for determining how fast the window should scroll in response to the mouse wheel. The result is not a “slower” or “faster” scroll, it’s a scroll that is slower in some circumstances and faster in others. It’s the kind of thing that’s noticed on a subliminal level.

You might wondering why I’m complaining about scroll speed. It’s because once I had a build that didn’t immediately crash (hah!), the very first thing I did (after waiting a ridiculous amount of time for Firefox to start) was load up a page and try to scroll down it.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:25:11 +0000

I used the beta as a chance to try it out again. The latest builds consume infinite CPU on my system. And, in a twist that made me laugh, they cause Spin Control to… well, spin.