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:Screenshot/Mockups (Score:5, Interesting)
That's some nice eye candy. But will Firefox stay relevant? Chrome is coming up fast and Mozilla seems to be stagnating. It sad to be in a state where your only source of income is your competitor.
From an earlier post of mine:
Mozilla corporation seems to be pretty badly run. They solicited donations for the NYT ad(some of my poor college friends scraped together money for it) while overpaying the CEO($500K per year)! The management was supposed to find different ways of getting funding but Mozilla is still dependent totally on Google(which competes with it's own rival browser). Mozilla made $66 million in revenue just in 2006 while development was largely done by unpaid volunteers.
In the meantime, Firefox was quite bloated, crash prone and lost the speed race to Chrome, Thunderbird stagnated and nothing really innovative or useful came out of Mozilla labs. Ubuntu will probably switch to Chromium and Firefox will start losing search revenue. . Probably the only thing going for Firefox are extensions(Chrome supports extensions now) and proper Adblock. Things are so bad that the CEO is planning to step down
Sad to see one of the epitomes of FOSS go down in flames like this.
Re:Screenshot/Mockups (Score:3, Interesting)
You should go look at the replies to your earlier post to see why this doesn't mean Mozilla is going down in flames. The CEO was planning on leaving within a year when he joined. The NY Times ad was just a fun way for people to get involved and get their names in the paper. The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income. Most Mozilla development is done by paid Mozilla employees. The $66 million revenue will help tide them over if they stop receiving funding from Google. Firefox is not getting bloated or crash-prone. Mozilla is not going down in flames.
The one element of truth is that Chrome is faster at JavaScript, but Mozilla developers are working to make Mozilla about as fast if not faster by working on the new fatvals method JIT and their tracing JIT.
Re:more importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
But I always run flashblock yet do allow Flash on certain sites like youtube.
So you might be right, Flash is still the main cause of browser instability.
Yet I thought the idea behind this 'Chromified' is to have tabs and processes run independently and thus a single bad page/tab should not take down the whole application.
Re:more importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:more importantly (Score:2, Interesting)
When you go out to your car in the morning and it doesn't start, do you say that your car manufacturer is making defective cars, or do you simply get it fixed?
Actually, I check to see if there's a recall at the NTSB or mycarfacts.com and some other sites to see if I can get fixed for free.
But wait, we're talking about software - an industry where standard procedure is to release shit and have the customer find all the bugs and faults that testing didn't.
And I have a Toyota you insensitive clod!
Re:more importantly (Score:4, Interesting)
with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open
Ah. I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows, for easy of cross-referencing without going backward and forward or digging around in bookmarks and waiting for pages to load. Firefox will randomly lockup once very other week or so (sometimes twice in one day, sometimes it'll be fine for a month). Oddly enough, it's not usually flash that causes the lockup, and memory leakage has never been a problem (rarely tops a gigabyte).
Re:more importantly (Score:5, Interesting)
I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows
Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong.
30-40 tabs? Fine, whatever. *300-400*? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell can you even manage to *find* the tabs you need? What, did you never learn about that fancy feature called "bookmarks"?
See some details about Firefox instability. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:more importantly (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you tried Read It Later [mozilla.org]? Seems like that might fit your browsing model.
Re:202,704 crashes in 14 days (Score:4, Interesting)
202,704 [mozilla.com] crashes in the latest version in the last 14 days.
And?
Firefox's installed base is >250,000,000 users according to a quick Google search, so if those crashes are random then it means that less than 0.1% of Firefox users saw a crash in the last two weeks. More likely a large fraction of them are systematic crashes due to some crappy addon.
Either way, a 0.1% chance of a crash in two weeks is a pretty strange definition of 'unstable'.
Re:more importantly (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, but you obviously don't check the memory usage as he does, I have used many tabs and left firefox open for days on end as well, and have noticed taskmanager slowly climbing while FF is open, showing no signs of stopping, so I do what I need and sometimes just force close and restores sessions to get back some memory, but for his problem where users/clients might be using it for office documents (openoffice.org) as excel spreadsheets or what not, it might be a disaster waiting to happen...
I am very happy with FF, but sometimes wonder if my copy i downloaded might have been MiM attacked
and swapped with a diff. version, I have 8 computers in all at home and all run diff. version each of FF (too lazy to upgrade all of them)....so I see the memory leaks....although one version (forget which) had been stabilized maybe 3.1...and then the whole started again with the newer version.
my fault for not keeping up to date, but I understood his point above
Re:more importantly (Score:1, Interesting)
(Different poster here)
But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for. It's what they've always been for. It's frustrating to have to reset about:config to have a single red "X" at the far right of the screen every time I switch machines (because I neither want, nor need, the horizontal space wasted by movable "X"s to which I might have to mouse), but I don't need anything more than a pixel or two of the favicon to know where I am in the stack. Frankly, I could do without the favicon altogether. A character or two of the title, "Wi" vs "Fa" would tell me whether I was on the "Windows..." or the "Failed Windows install" thread in my current situation, which is more than I'm seeing right now, as all there's room for (I've edited tab.minwidth too) right now is the favicon. (although it'd suck on "Sl..."ashdot comments :)
Presumably I'm also "abusing" the tab metaphor, which indicates to me that you somehow know what the "right way" to use tabs is. So anyways, what's the "official" way in which one is "supposed" to use tabs?
Because if it's not as a stack, then I've been missing something since Mozilla 0.x. I don't mean to come off as belligerent here, but I'm genuinely curious as to what point I've supposedly been missing.
(Some other guy in the thread wrote)
The root cause of the 100+ tab phenomenon is that web forums typically paginate every "n" pages for some ridiculously small value of "n", so something as short as a 50-post thread, at 10 posts per page, necessitates 5 more tabs. That's a web design problem designed to alleviate load on the database server that's retrieving the posts, or maximize banner ad impressions, or some combination of both. (I've never had stability problems, but I've always browsed with Javascript/Flash off. When I browse for content/research, I'm after text, not videos, because (espeically with 100+ tabs open to cover 5-10 potential answers to my question) I don't have time to watch 5-10 videos for the one or two explanatory sentences that'll solve my problem.)
1) Yes. It's a stack. I don't want to read, evaluate, and then click "back", losing context. I *DO* want to mindlessly (really, I'm in navigate and grab everything that's possibly relevant mode, not read, think and evaluate mode) pop open every link in a new tab.
2) I close 'em when I'm done with 'em, but that's probably not for another 10-15 minutes. After I've got the 100 tabs open, I start reading, using ^W to close the windows as I work my way through the stack, and optionally opening up another stack of 5-10 tabs if I come across something that really *is* relevant. Web forums are often hierarchical, so I've got a starting list of, say, 3-5 subforums ("Hardware fixes", "Software fixes", "Related bugs", "For Sale: Tools to fix it", which stay open, but each of them will spawn at least 3-4 tabs for "threads under each forum", and each of those threads will spawn 1-10+ tabs for each paginated thread.)
3) When I'm reading, my brain is in reading mode, not back/forward/navigating mode. I'm focusing on the content I've downloaded in step 1, and not remotely interested in clicking "back" to return to navigation/searching-for-more-content mode. 80-90% of the tabs I've opened in stage 2 are getting closed, and when I find myself with nothing left but the root subforums from stage 2, I click "next page" on each of the root subforums, and repeat.