We're finally diving headfirst into planning for the Firefox 1.1 release. As many of you know, this release is a minor update without significant feature additions. The goals for this release are primarily to get the Firefox 1.0 code integrated with the latest and greatest Gecko code from the Mozilla development trunk.
If all goes as planned, we'll be syncing all of this up at the 1.8 branchpoint and delivering a Firefox and Thunderbird 1.1 release based on Gecko 1.8. Right now that branch is scheduled to happen in late February or early March with a release from the branch sometime after that.
In order for us to make sure this release is of the highest quality, we're looking for your help in identifying any significant 1.0 problems that need to be fixed for 1.1 and any regressions we've had in the nightly builds since 1.0 shipped.
If you've got cycles to spare, please grab the latest nightly builds of Firefox, use them for your day to day browsing, and report any regressions you find. Also, if you know of bugs that meet either of the two categories above, please nominate them for fixing in the 1.1 cycle by setting the blocking-aviary1.1? flag. The project team will evaluate all of those requests as we start to build the 1.1 buglist.
Just a reminder, this is not a feature release, it's a Gecko update that should provide performance, stability, and website comaptibility improvements for Firefox. We will try to squeeze in a few critical features like Safari migration and default browser settings for Mac that missed the 1.0 boat, but we're not looking for additional feature nominations.
Thanks for your help and I look forward to wading through all of your 1.1 bug nominations :-)
update: See also Ben's post over at Inside Firefox.
Posted by asa at January 22, 2005 07:03 PM..We will try to squeeze in a few critical features like Safari migration and default browser settings for Mac that missed the 1.0 boat,..
we will try to squeeze in ? i thought a promise was made that ( after ignoring them for 1.0 ) many mac related issues will be dealt in 1.1 . why do i have a feeling that you guys do not particularly care about us Mac platform users .
Don't care? I've been working for the past month on a variety of things that will benefit Mac users. I have a lot of code written for various Mac migrators, default browser, enhanced preferences etc. It's a matter of finishing it up and checking it in, and that's what I'm doing now.
Posted by: Ben on January 22, 2005 07:28 PMDon't care about Mac users!! It's quite obvious you haven't been watching the daily code checkins.. Even without the work that Ben is doing, a high percentage of recent fixes have been "Mac-only". Enough to make a Windows user a little jealous... Of course now that the Mini Mac is out, maybe I will become a cross-platform guy as well!!
Posted by: Darin Grimm on January 22, 2005 08:12 PMIt'd be great if those memory leaks were fixed, Firefox was eating over 200MB last night, it shocked me!
Posted by: Arvind on January 22, 2005 09:41 PMYeah, the memory bugs need to be fixed. I have a hypothesis that they're related to heavy tab usage. It seems like when you close tabs, the memory that was used by that session isn't released. So, the more tabs that have been closed, and the more pages that had been viewed in those closed tabs, the greater the memory leaked. That would explain why me, a heavy tab user, often see Firefox using 200MB-400MB or memory as well as why many people (who don't use tabs) don't see this problem. However, I haven't been able to prove any of this, and the memory bugs that have been filed seem to not get a lot of attention.
Here are a few of the bugs:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174604
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130157
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158317
Burning Edge has a good list of FF 1.0 and current trunk parity issues. I just want to add that bugzilla currently has 37 open layout crashers which would be nice to fix for 1.8 and FF 1.1 as well:
37 layout crashers
Here is a working link.
Posted by: Walter K on January 23, 2005 12:08 AMDo you plan to release Windows x64 version as well?
Posted by: Metropolis on January 23, 2005 12:52 AMhttps://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258878
Posted by: Thomas on January 23, 2005 02:12 AMIt is definately ability to search in forms. We need this fixed.
Posted by: Papuass on January 23, 2005 05:30 AMThere are 4 bugs in the aviary-landing category that are filed against Firefox, becuase the current issue is in Firefox only. However, the code area where the fix would need to be applied is a shared component. IMHO these need to be fixed before 1.8beta (probably should have been addressed before 1.8a6, but it's a bit late for that now), but as they are currently filed against Firefox, there is no way to set a flag to block 1.8beta. The bugs in question are:
The other aviary-landing bug in the category is already filed against the core component and does ahve a request to block 1.8beta. It is bug
Getting the issues resolved between the Firefox and the suite group as to how these need to be fixed earlier rather than later will hopefully result in better Suite and Firefox releases.
Arvind, Paul -
Ok, guys, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. No memory is being "leaked", it's still all there and accounted for, we know how it got there, it's just that Firefox doesn't, er, release it back to the OS memory manager, that's all. It's not a bug, it's a feature! I think it's called "Advanced Nonlinear Access Lock Retentive" memory allocator, or something like that. Try to look it up on the dev mailing lists, mebbe...
Next time before you rant, go read a bug or a hundred in Bugzilla!
Posted by: S.F. on January 23, 2005 07:17 AMThis may not seem like a huge deal in the midst of all of these crash bugs, but here's one that should be addressed:
As noted in Comment 15, there is a potential security issue with this bug.
Posted by: Lisa on January 23, 2005 09:27 AMS.F.: Was that supposed to be some kind of joke?
I mean, yes I've seen Bugzilla posts where developers will argue the definition of "memory leak" and claim this problem isn't a memory leak. I don't care what you call it, the program should be using X amount of RAM when what it's using now is X + 300MB or more. That sounds like a bug to me. Call it whatever you want, but that's not good. People seeing an app using 400MB of memory is not good. People having degraded performance because they browser they chose to use won't release unused memory back to the system is what I would call not a good thing. Having to close Firefox twice or more a day so that it doesn't gum up things is not a good thing.
And yet, I see people complaining about this on multiple operating systems in messages from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and now 2005.
Posted by: Paul on January 23, 2005 12:52 PM"developers will argue the definition of "memory leak" and claim this problem isn't a memory leak"
You may not care if it's one memory leak, many memory leaks, or something other than a memory leak which causes Firefox to use a lot of RAM, but to actually fix problems, the details matter.
"I used the browser for 12 hours and browsed a bunch of different sites, and I have a bunch of plugins and a bunch of extensions, and at the end it used lots of memory" is not a useful bug report. If you can describe a series of steps, click by click, which repeatedly make the memory usage go up and not go down, then file a bug.
Most "average users" close the browser far more than twice per day anyway, so it's not a significant issue for them.
Posted by: michaell on January 23, 2005 05:49 PMI posted three bugzilla entries in my first post that could be related to the problem. The bugs already exist. Filing another bug that will be found to be a duplicate of a bug that was filed in 2002 and has been lingering since isn't going to fix the problem. There are multiple bugzilla entries and multiple MZ forum posts (about once a week someone brings this up) concerning this problem. I've tried setting blocking-aviary1.1? for several of these bugs and someone turned it down, for what reasons I do not know. The users have really done all they could about this.
There no specific steps that will reproduce this problem because it happens it happens constantly. It doesn't just happen "sometimes", it happens every day. For example, a few minutes ago I was browsing FaceBook, an online community site, and opened several dozen tabs, which I have since closed. Firefox is now using 170MB of RAM when there are now only 11 tabs open. I have just closed three tabs, and the memory usage didn't change.
I mean, is it a reasonable expectation that Firefox should not gobble up RAM?
I find this frustrating. Anytime anyone brings up this problem, they get laughed at or shot down. If you do a search on Google Groups you'll find that this has been a problem for years. That's not very heartening.
Posted by: Paul on January 23, 2005 10:40 PM> Most "average users" close the browser far
> more than twice per day anyway, so it's not
> a significant issue for them.
What an interesting line of thought!
A coder that can shrug off a mem leak by saying "no biggie, only 5% of my users get bitten by this" is a wanker, not a coder. YES, I just used a bad word, and it was intentional.
Besides, a memory leak by any other name would stink as rotten, as the poet said...
Posted by: hedgehog on January 24, 2005 06:07 PMit would be huge if the search feature allowed you to search within a text-editing box-- especially helpful for people editing blogs/wikis.
sorry if this falls under suggestion for "feature release".
Posted by: scott on January 25, 2005 08:42 AMRegarding the memory eating by FF..... found the following at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=172041
"type about:config into the location bar, press enter, right click any line, choose "new">"integer", paste this into the dialogue that appears:
browser.cache.memory.capacity
click okay, specify the amount in kb in the next dialogue that appears, restart firefox. -LeRoi"
I'd like to see this fixed in 1.1. Personally, I don't like a browser that is hogging more resources than World of Warcraft!! And that's only with 3-4 tabs open at a time. Why they would make a "feature" (as S.F. called it) to make FF not release the memory back to the OS after the tab/s is/are closed is beyond my reasoning. lol
^_^
Posted by: tish on January 30, 2005 01:43 AM