Firefox 4.0 Beta Candidate Available 366
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."
Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S : Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.
Re:Didn't recognize exactly how slow Firefox is..w (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Didn't recognize exactly how slow Firefox is..w (Score:3, Insightful)
I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.
Re:No major changes (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, but if the summary is correct, is this not what most of the firefox critics have all been clamoring for?
A smoother and more reliable firefox without a boatload of shiny new features?
Re:more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Re:Screenshot/Mockups (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not want. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:more importantly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Screenshot/Mockups (Score:4, Insightful)
The CEO was planning on leaving within a year when he joined. T
The CEO planning on leaving within a year somehow justifies the needlessly fat paycheck?
. The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income.
It's what now, 6 years and still no success in cultivating other sources of income? I mean the management is paid top bucks for doing exactly that, right?
Most Mozilla development is done by paid Mozilla employees
Err, that wasn't quite what we heard when we were complaining about bloat and memory leaks. All we got was 'if you don't like it, fork it' and we had no right to complain because it was the work of unpaid volunteers working in their free time.
I mean, if people are getting paid, how hard is it to assign them boring tasks but which matter a lot to the end user? It's not just about scratching your itch when you're getting paid.
. The $66 million revenue will help tide them over if they stop receiving funding from Google. Firefox is not getting bloated or crash-prone
Not if the money is being squandered on C-level executives.
Re:more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Screenshot/Mockups (Score:4, Insightful)
Even Netscape navigator is still used by a minority. That's not the point. How many people knows about "about:config", or wants to?
I guess most slashdotters are driven to FF by the extensions; but most of its users were "converted" from IE just because its (perceived and real) vulnerable nature against malware.
Re:more importantly (Score:2, Insightful)
flash is fine.
lets just leave the "proprietary" part aside for the moment.
the reason why "flash sucks" is because the developers cant be asked to optimize their code for memory leaks.
saying "flash sucks" because it makes your browser crash is like saying "c++ sux" because the developer forgot to delete a pointer causing a memory leak to crash yer box. you would never say "c++ sux!". in fact, you might even say the opposite, that it would "blow yer leg off if yer not careful...". i think the same consideration applies to AS3/Flex framework.
optimize your code. profile the flash app. and watch how yer flash experience improves. it really will be stable.
i promise. scout's honor.
if you want a better flash experience than you need to go to the source of the issue: inadvertant memory leaks caused by badly written poorly optimized code that was never, ever profiled.
the problem, however, also lies with Adobe. they continue to market Flash to "designers" who cant program their way out of a paper bag, instead of "developers" who might know a thing or two. and they continue to confuse the issue by having a timeline-based Flash creation tool in addition to their Enterpise-level toolchain that allows "designers" to add hack upon hack upon hack.
this is why "flash sux".
-0.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable. Apparently the Firefox memory leak bugs interact with some weakness in Windows XP SP3, and that causes Windows to become unstable. It seems that whoever debugs Firefox might also gain a good reputation from finding a major problem in Windows.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version lists Crashes with evidence of memory corruption [mozilla.org] as one of the fixes. Those crashes are only the ones automatically reported by the crash reporter. Many of the crashes happen without invoking the crash reporter. Firefox is crashy.
We love Firefox because it has the add-ons we need. But we need it to be stable. I hope version 4 reverses the history of bad management at Mozilla Foundation. Remember, Foundation gets more than $50 million from Google every year [techcrunch.com] to make Google the default search engine.
Mozilla Foundation has an enormous amount of cash: "Total assets as of December 31, 2008 were $116 million, up from $99 million at the end of 2007, an increase of 17% to our asset base." [lizardwrangler.com] The foundation was run by Mitchell Baker, a lawyer with little or no technical knowledge and very limited social ability. Now that she is Chairwoman and no longer CEO, the management does not seem sufficiently improved.
The parent comment is currently marked "Flamebait". People have commented saying that they have no problems.
Some of the instabilities are difficult to debug because they don't always occur. Visit Mozilla Crash Reporter [mozilla.com] for more information. Some of the instabilities occur because of the interaction of Firefox with Microsoft Windows, apparently, when Firefox reaches the limit of installed memory and begins to require virtual memory. Firefox is more stable in Linux, apparently.
There is a web page discussing Firefox crashes [mozilla.com] and what users can do about it.
Look at the current crash statistics [mozilla.com].
See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures [mozilla.com] in the current version of Firefox, 3.6.6.
It seems that an organization that has more than $100 million in assets could stop other work and address the instabilities.
Much more could be written, but that's enough for now.
Re:Do not want. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ditto. I don't dislike Chrome as a browser, but I hate the UI- its everything I hate in a UI, and more. From replacing labels with abstract pictures, to hiding menus within super-menus instead of having toolbars.
I can only hope the default GNOME version is more sane, as I do hate having to replace "themes".
Re:more importantly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:more importantly (Score:4, Insightful)
I like to think of each window with tabs as a stack. One page leads you to another, push another tab on the stack. When you're done with that task, pop the tab off the stack. Bookmarks are too permanent. I may never need that tab again. But I might, so I'm glad it's there when I get back to it. Lots of times I'll come to a stopping point and close a bunch of tabs, going back a week or more. Then I'll dig up some tab that I had entirely forgotten about, would not have cared enough to bookmark, but it serves as a good start for more browsing.
Re:What I don't get: (Score:0, Insightful)
I find it to be extremely easy, fast, and efficient. (I also have keyboard-only alternatives for everything.)
Does your mother or grandmother find it easy, fast or efficient? When you taught them these concepts, how long did it take them to memorize them and use them as easily, quickly, and efficiently as you do?
Re:more importantly (Score:4, Insightful)
Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway,
a) Reloads... who really cares?
b) No, they're a complete hierarchy for organization. They're only a list if you don't know how to use 'em.
But, whatever, if that's how you want to use FF, hey, go nuts. But don't complain if it starts to behave strangely. Any sane person should realize you're *way* outside of the "supported functionality" envelope and are basically abusing the tabbed browsing metaphor (badly).
Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common (Score:3, Insightful)
I can corroborate that; No crash in Debian Linux Sid for more than four months. Also, although it uses plenty of memory, it doesn't grow continually.
Maybe it's a Windows problem, not a Firefox one?
I think the point being made is... (Score:1, Insightful)
the answers to your two questions:
> How many people knows about "about:config", or wants to?
are actually the same, which is exactly why Firefox will continue to survive. Point is: if you want the configuration options, then they're there for you. But if you don't it's not like it's the only way that you can access them. They provide the best of both worlds in this respect and as such will continue to maintain a user base.
Fact of the matter is, maybe Firefox needs to suffer a little bit so that they can realize, much like they did when they splintered Firefox (then Phoenix) off of the main Mozilla browser, that they need to make some effective changes in order to maintain market share.
I encourage this. And the point isn't that FF is the best alternative, but that they're good enough to drive the commercially-driven models up to their standard. It's arguable that without Firefox, IE8 never would have been the bastion of standards compliance that it (debatably) currently is. We would still be dealing with the same kind of authoritarian "We're the biggest browser so just make your website compatible to us" attitude that formed the behemoth known as IE6.
I think the point of Open Source Software isn't that it should act as a full-on replacement for commercial software. But at least they can set the standard - comply to this level of quality, or your business model is going to fail, because ours is essentially free and if it's better nobody is going to want your product.
Re:more importantly (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you tried.... not being a moron? It's a good place to start.
Re:more importantly (Score:3, Insightful)
Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a problem affecting most of them, at least on the same platform and such. It's just a question of how rarely the circumstances of the crash appear and if it's specific to exactly what you're doing.
Re:more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for.
I'm sorry, no, that's absolutely false.
The tab metaphor was *never* intended to accomodate *hundreds* of live tabs. If it were, there would be better mechanisms for organizing tabs, finding them, etc. No, the tab metaphor is meant for *maybe* dozens of tabs, tops.