noel alanguilan

i was able to upgrade my firefox 3.0.xx to 3.5 a couple weeks ago with the help of jun auza (thanks dude). i opted to follow his second option of installing ff 3.5 with one command. a few days ago i found out that firefox 3.5.2 was released. to upgrade to the latest i looked for the package for my distro from the mozilla releases page. then on the terminal i issued a slightly modified command from jun’s:

wget -O - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5.2/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.2.tar.bz2 | tar xj -C ~

this should work for future releases. just check the full url of the release first from mozilla and modify the command as needed.

important note: this worked for me. it may not work for you. the risk is yours.

firefox 3.5 just came out. and from the reviews of the release candidates, 3.5′s javascripts’s performance is twice as fast as the previous release (3.0.11). its also a good chance for me to play with html5–the up and coming web standard.

firefox 3.0.10 did not solve facebook-eating-memory issue for me

i woke up with an update waiting for me. it was apparently firefox 3.0.10. the first thing that came to mind was install the update and visit facebook to see if there were any improvements from the last version. ufortunately, as sh0wn by the screenshots, there were none or very little improvements. it still doesn’t release memory properly unless you close firefox altogether.

i used the same test as the last time.

and this is the usresponsive script which has been giving me problems

it was just a hunch that i’ve been meaning to dive into for a couple of days now. when i’m on facebook, the memory footprint of firefox gets larger and larger until i reach that point where i am forced to close firefox (or kill the process). i do have several tabs open at the same time–besides facebook i am also accessing my mail, this blog, slashdot, a news site, a bike forum, flickr and ubuntu forums, just to name a handful. so it was hard to pin down the culprit to just one site.

this morning i decided to experiment. from a fresh boot:

• start firefox
• log on to facebook only (defaults to my profile)
• click on home
• click on a friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on another friend’s profile
• click on home
• click on a third friend’s profile
• click on home

in the memory and swap history section, each step corresponds to each visit to my 'home' page in facebook

i waited for the browser to finish loading each page before moving on and clicking on the next. by the fourth visit to my home page the browser started to get sluggish and it popped a warning (second image) saying that there is an unresponsive script on the page and it is offering either to let the script continue or to stop it. i opted to stop the script and close the browser. the first image shows an increase in memory usage each time the home page in facebook is revisited. by the fourth visit the swap memory has started to increase as well.

i also found out that closing the browser tab where facebook is assigned does not free the memory it used. that can only be accomlished by closing the browser itself.

this may be the script that's allocating all that memory.

i’m not sure which is really the culprit but i’m leaning more on firefox’s memory handling. i do not remember the previous versions being this  bad at handling memory. but then again facebook may be using a new script for the user’s home page.

i’m just hoping it gets fixed. soon.

i’ve been asked what linux “looks” like so many times that i thought i’d make a post comprising screen shots of my linux installation. i get the impression that people still think that linux is text-based like dos (disk operating system) but its not, as you can clearly see. its a point and click affair much like windows or os x. you have the icons, the trash bin, panels (as opposed to task bars in windows), the clock (let’s not forget that), shutdown/log out/restart button — all of the usual stuff in a graphical user interface.

of course, this being linux means it also comes with a lot of useful programs for free. my top three are firefox, gimp and bluefish (html editor).

below are the things i use and see on my workstation. it works for me. if you want to see more screenshots you can visit the coding studio. they have tons of screenshots.

[Show as slideshow]

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now, if i piqued your interest and you want to know what other applications you can run on linux someone already gathered the top 50 linux alternatives to popular apps.

my bookmarks are a mess. at some point years ago i tried organizing them neatly into folders and subfolders and subfolders but given some time and a couple of hundred web pages later my bookmarks have transformed into an even bigger organized mess. its like leaving cheese in the fridge for five and a half months — it evolves and takes on a life of its own. time to reorganize again.

sort of.

version 3.0.x of firefox added tags to their bookmarks which i started playing with for a couple of hours now. its really not new — del.icio.us has been at it for some time now but in this version the tags and the bookmarks are in your computer not on the internet. what i like about tags is that you are able to use your own words to associate with the bookmarks that you save. in a sense, its not really sorting things in an ordered — ascending/decending/numbered/alphabetical — manner but organizing things so that my brain (what’s left of it) can easily access it via word association.

now the problem that i face is to add tags to the hundreds of bookmarks that i already have. that will take some time, i’m sure, but there is a way to add a tag or two to several bookmarks at once. tagging for multiple bookmarks is an add-on to firefox which performs exactly this. a word of warning though, as of this writing, the add-on is still marked as experimental so it may be buggy. so far it hasn’t given me any problems.

links:
Mozilla’s bookmark tags
tagging for multiple bookmarks

at least with the linux version, it is. as of this writing the version for windows is not yet available but i would assume it will be soon… mozilla.com is even asking for help in setting the guiness book of records for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

as for the software itself, the good news is that it really uses lesser memory than version 2 and it even feels faster.

there are some small features that seems insignificant but turns out to be a time saver. one of them would be the smart bookmarks. i especially liked the fact that i can type the first few letters of the title of a page, instead of the web page address,  in the address bar and the browser will search the history for it and give you suggestions. nice.

its only been a few days but i’m liking my fox even more. its definitely worth the download.