Firefox v.7.0 Is Out

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For those of you interested, Firefox 7.0 is now out. According to the site, the latest version of Firefox has the following changes:

  1. Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases
  2. Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
  3. Added support for the Web Timing specification
  4. Fixed several stability issues
  5. Fixed several security issues
 
Definitely smaller memory usage. Thats noticeable out of the gate.
 
Enjoying the smaller memory a lot. Noticed a few sites like Game Informer load faster as well. It's nice to see this faster release cycle is paying off.
 
It's not crashing as much, which was a first for me. I guess 6.x didn't like something I had. As an aside, the nightly beta is up to 10.1
 
I use dpi scaling at 200% at 2560 x 1600. Since version 4, FF does not scale right. I went back to the latest version of 3. Can anyone confirm if the scaling works well in version 7?
 
I am stuck on 4.0.1 at work because the update from there to the next build required admin rights, and at work I do not have admin rights. And so every time I start firefox, it tries to apply the patch then I have to click 'OK' to dismiss the error. FML.
 
I;m a huge firefox fan until a few months ago i switch to Chrome. I tried FF7 it's good not great and Chrome still feels faster. Sorry Mozilla gotta try harder.
 
Some known issues were pre-announced in the SUMO forum.
The most important bug that hit me was that add-ons with an update pending will disappear after the upgrade.
So make sure to close and restart Firefox 6 just before installing 7.0. This should be fixed in upcoming 7.0.1.

The lower memory usage is definitely a plus. Still not as good as expected, it looks like YouTube cache or something is not purged fully even after deleting the corresponding tabs, and some memory might be leaking in the system outside of the firefox.exe process: My RAM usage is over 2 GB when firefox.exe uses "only" about 580-610 MB (it fluctuates constantly) with only Firefox and Task Manager running, not even Windows Explorer.

I haven't rebooted after the upgrade yet, maybe things will get better.
 
Glad to see 7 finally pushed out. Already on Aurora version 9.0 at the moment. Let me tell you guys who only run the stable - you are in for a treat with Firefox 9.
 
i tried those ie 9 html 5 tests that they did. it runs a lot faster for those tests now.
 
Ryan711 said:
anyone notice a font change or am I going crazy?
Click to expand...

Since so many people complained that the text rendering was blurry they changed it back to GDI classic rendering mode by default, or what it was in Firefox 3.x

There's 7 different font rendering modes. in about:config change the value "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode" to whichever looks right to you.

-1 - Firefox Default
0 - Default
1 - Aliased
2 - GDI Classic
3 - GDI Natural
4 - Natural
5 - Natural Symmetric

MSDN link to what each setting means if you care.
 
Chimel said:
The lower memory usage is definitely a plus. Still not as good as expected, it looks like YouTube cache or something is not purged fully even after deleting the corresponding tabs, and some memory might be leaking in the system outside of the firefox.exe process: My RAM usage is over 2 GB when firefox.exe uses "only" about 580-610 MB (it fluctuates constantly) with only Firefox and Task Manager running, not even Windows Explorer.

I haven't rebooted after the upgrade yet, maybe things will get better.
Click to expand...

7 is just getting the ball rolling on memory improvements 8 is even better, and the 9 is also looking promising on that front. And those who still complain about javascript should be happy as 8 and 9 works on that as well. 10 should also resolve a lot of the addon update issues too.
 
I don't notice any diff with this version and older. Only one addon not compaible but no biggie. I haven't used it in forever lol. So my thoughts on new version..Meh
 
Still plagued with the same issue I've had since 3.5

This happens randomly to me like once or twice a week, I'll be browsing the web and when I'm switching sites my firefox suddenly freezes and locks up for about 20-40 seconds. I narrowed it down to where firefox is accessing my system fonts, all 2,476 of them, it's as if it processes all of them. And I can't do anything till it finishes going through every single one.

Unfortunately this problem has been around for almost a year and haven't been able to find any sort of topic relating to my problem. So if anyone has any ideas, let me know.
 
Firefox has not had high memory usage for a long time, your plugins do. I use just 2 plugins, always have, and my memory usage has been as low or lower than chrome for quite a while.
 
Pawz2142 said:
I;m a huge firefox fan until a few months ago i switch to Chrome. I tried FF7 it's good not great and Chrome still feels faster. Sorry Mozilla gotta try harder.
Click to expand...

Yep. When I went Win7, I decided to just also go fresh with my browsers. I use a portabled version of Chrome with Flash and an install of Chromium so I can have a browser without Flash.

I wish I had done this a long time ago. Good riddance to Firefox. Now that the extensions have caught up, there's no reason for me to continue trying to use Firefox.

Chrome may eat up more ram overall but at least killing the tab frees ALL that it was using.
 
umcpgrad said:
huge revision number change with little updates and fixes
Click to expand...

I expect better from the members of [H]ard. Not every update needs UI changes for it contain huge amounts of updates and bug fixes.

Version 7 is such an update. Version 8 and ESPECIALLY 9 will introduce massive performance benefits as well without a lot of user facing changes.

I also like the hypocrisy of no-one having this issue with Chrome. When was the last Chrome update that had a lot of user facing changes? Years?
 
Solidstate89 said:
I expect better from the members of [H]ard. Not every update needs UI changes for it contain huge amounts of updates and bug fixes.

Version 7 is such an update. Version 8 and ESPECIALLY 9 will introduce massive performance benefits as well without a lot of user facing changes.

I also like the hypocrisy of no-one having this issue with Chrome. When was the last Chrome update that had a lot of user facing changes? Years?
Click to expand...

If you'll also notice, nobody announces the version of Chrome they're using.

Firefox also has been a running joke for almost a decade now because of its horrible memory management and it took them how many years to do something about it?

Chrome has been very consistent about their use of version numbers. Firefox only decided to accelerate their versioning in response to that to make it appear that they were "keeping up"... By this point, it's plainly obvious that Chrome just rolls along whereas Firefox is scrambling. They should have had their memory issues nipped in the bud before v3 before the need for a browser other than Firefox was needed.
 
Started using it this morning, and it already closed for no reason at all for me. Still gonna use it, but I was amused that it just flat out disappeared, no errors, no nothing. Still scratching my head over that one.
 
I have been a fan for years, but with 6 I'm sure I got hacked, even with no-script and ad aware.

My wife's PC as well....So I switched to chrome, we'll see how long that lasts.
 
I've been using the Aurora Builds for about 6 months now and they keep getting better and better. I like Chrome and IE9 but I'm Partial to Firefox and they've been doing a good job. All they need to do know is support group policy extensions natively ala Chrome and IE.

There's a company called Front Motion that rolls their own MSI for use with GP but it's a pain and Mozilla should support that themslves. Though, a little bird told me that that's coming soon enough. :p
 
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