Mozilla releases Firefox 3 Alpha 6

On Tuesday, without fanfare, Mozilla quietly released the final alpha for its new Firefox 3, codenamed Gran Paradiso. Alpha 6 doesn't add much to Firefox in terms of new features; we expect that to happen with the first betas. As with previous Alphas, most of the tweaks are internal. See our slide show of Alpha 5 to see what changes are currently visible within Firefox 3.

According to the Alpha 6 release notes this version includes: Updated SQLite engine to version 3.3.17; support for site-specific preferences--text size; a new Quit dialog box that resolves termination errors; added permanent 'Restart Firefox' button to Add-Ons Manager; miscellaneous fixes to download manager including correctly displaying large file sizes; various Places fixes; and miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes.

It is the latter, the miscellaneous bug fixes within Gecko 1.9, that may affect Web and platform performance. Once again, Mozilla recommends this alpha release only for developers. Mozilla urges current users of Firefox 2 to wait until Firefox 3 is finally released in October or November of this year.

[geekpro]

What about the Memory Issues?

Firefox has said publicly that their browser does not have a memory leak.

That may or may not be the case, but if you open IE7 and Firefox 2.0.0.4 and then the windows task manager/process tab, you'll notice that when you minimize firefox it continues to use a lot of ram, but when you minimize IE7 it's memory usage drops significantly.

Why is that?

[pcabellor]

Relief for Firefox's memory issues

A new feature, XPCOM Cycle Collector was recently added to Firefox 3 code and it will help reduce memory leaks as a background process dedicates to release chunks of memory not in use any more.
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/06/cycle-collector-to-relieve-firefox-memory-problems/

[Hardrada]

don't use extensions

stop using extensions which leak memory :)

well, firefox is totally useless without extensions .... so the only suggestion is to stop using it...

[Kuko Ako]

Can't wait for the final release

I've looked at Gran Paradiso's support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a w3C recommendation for describing 2-D graphics in XML. Very promising--kudos to the developers at Mozilla! Here's hoping that support for SVG will be equally good on the Mac as it is currently on the Windows platform. I wonder though if SVG text will remain unselectable.

[drjorgei]

i like cnet