Firefox 5 Details: Sharing, Home Tab, PDF Viewer 453
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 may be still new, but Firefox 5 is already being prepared by Mozilla. At least the UI features have been laid out by the Mozilla team — there are nine new features in total. There are some features that are replicating Chrome functionality (tab multi-select or an integrated PDF viewer that will also extend to other file formats), but there are completely new features such as tab web apps, an identity manager a home tab that replaces the home button as well as a social sharing feature that is integrated in the URL bar and enables users to post directly to their Facebook and Twitter pages."
Re:Chrome Lite with leaks (Score:5, Informative)
> and figure out how to run Firefox extensions on there
How much work do you estimate this to be, exactly? Chances are, your estimate is low.
> have much better memory use and performance.
Firefox has better performance and memory use than Chrome in many cases. It's worse in others. Both browsers are improving.
How would having only one implementation be better for consumers than two competing ones?
Re:Chrome Lite with leaks (Score:5, Informative)
My main issue with Firefox right now is not a lack of Facebook integration (-_-) but the obvious memory leakage in the released FF 4 with AdBlock/NoScript, which was present through the entire last half of the beta cycle.
Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. We are constantly working hard on memory issues, you can follow this meta-bug [mozilla.org] for example, to see how progress is going.
;)
The fact is though, that the people that work on frontend stuff like app tabs and so forth, are different from the people that work on more hardcore things like memory usage. It isn't as if we can say, everyone should work on memory usage now. So we will always have a lot of work going on on both frontend and platform stuff - but, by the nature of things, the press and blogs will report on frontend stuff. So you might get the idea that Firefox devs are all working on things like app tabs and panorama - but that is very untrue! It's just that platform improvements under the hood are, well, under the hood
Btw, a long-term solution for all these memory issues will likely be when we switch to one process per tab. Then we'll have something similar to what Chrome has - higher baseline memory usage (overhead of processes and duplication, etc.), but more predictable memory freeing when tabs are closed and a very easy way to see which tabs are responsible for which memory. We are already working very hard on this, and a version of it shipped with Firefox Mobile just now, actually (separate processes for the UI and for web content) - so while it's not done yet, it's making very good progress. A release of desktop Firefox late this year should add the same functionality.