Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 Released

balster neb writes "Mozilla has released the first Beta of Firefox 4, the next major version of the popular web browser. Apart from the new 'Chromified' tabs-on-top UI, there are many major improvements in performance and HTML5 support. This release also adds support for the new WebM video format. Other changes include faster DOM and CSS performance, improved UI responsiveness, hardware 2D acceleration, experimental WebGL support, and better JavaScript performance (though this beta does not include the new JaegerMonkey JIT engine). More details on the Mozilla blog."

Re:First Post !!

[iammani]

Good, finding the winner is always bad. A continuous search for the winner is always in the interest of the user.

Re:First Post !!

[OSDever]

I'll give you that it feels fat and slow in comparison to, say, elinks. I'll even give you that it's fat and slow in comparison to the first versions of Firefox. But in comparison to existing browsers, it trumps IE (obviously,) and, from the short time I've been using it, seems to be running faster with less of a memory footprint than Chrome. I won't lie, extensive testing will have to happen to make me switch, but things are looking up for Firefox right about now.

Option to use the old UI?

[elrous0]

I hate the Chrome interface. I was hoping that Firefox wouldn't go that route. Does anyone know if the new beta still has an option to use the classic interface?

Re:First Post !!

[The MAZZTer]

Indeed, it is definitely faster than 3.6. Only problem I've noticed so far is that if you were using a third party theme with 3.6, 4.0b1 will happily use it even if not compatible, so you have to switch it manually.

Re:First Post !!

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's technically true that unused RAM goes to waste, RAM that isn't used by programs is typically used for disk cache, which does speed things up (sometimes a lot). So lower RAM usage is still a plus.

Re:Option to use the old UI?

[Chaos Incarnate]

Tabs on top makes sense. Tabs as the window's title bar doesn't.

Re:I'll never let go, Firefox. I'll never let go.

[drinkypoo]

Why do you need to? Chrome renders pages faster, sure, but I don't really give a shit about a couple of milliseconds rendering time.

We're talking real-world (not synthetic benchmarks, but actual page loads) improvements of 100% or more, probably due largely to the fact that Chrome can execute Javascript on something like a reasonable schedule.

Chrome has isolated tabs, but crashes more than Firefox anyway (at least for me).

For me it's quite the reverse. And I'm running dailies!

Finally, when you have a really nice open source browser that isn't entirely controlled by a giant behemoth that knows everything about you, why not use it?

Chrome isn't "entirely controlled by a giant behemoth" either, it's based on WebKit. And Chromium is entirely open-source so if you really want to, you can see what's going on in there, change things, et cetera. Meanwhile, every time I've ever installed Firefox it's defaulted to google search with suggestions/autocomplete, which means that google is spying on you when you use firefox.

P.S. Gecko is still much faster at some things, i.e. image rendering and animation.

If every damned site out there wasn't overusing Javascript that might be a compelling argument.

Re:Now hopefully...

[Anonymous Coward]

financing it through advertising/marketing

This meme needs to die. Who do you think pays marketers salaries? You do via higher cost products and your lost time and attention. Marketing pays for nothing.

Re:I'll never let go, Firefox. I'll never let go.

[Colonel Korn]

P.S. Gecko is still much faster at some things, i.e. image rendering and animation.

If every damned site out there wasn't overusing Javascript that might be a compelling argument.

A lot of sites with heavy image content scroll smoothly in Firefox, Opera, and even IE, but struggle along at about 5 fps when scrolling with the webkit browsers. That's my main issue with Chrome.

Re:Not bad

[Improv]

Why would it matter who came up with any given feature first? In software, all ideas are recycled.

Re:Option to use the old UI?

[quickOnTheUptake]

You can go further:
tabs are a hack by applications to make up for the failure of the traditional WM model and it's inability to handle large numbers of windows.

"Faster" for who?

[h00manist]

Its really annoying to see everyone saying their browser runs "faster", then browsing pages on any kind of out-of-date pc and seeing it go as fast as cold molasses. Come on, just to browse websites you need to buy new computers? It's not easy to make standards good for all, but some kind of tolerance for older equipment is necessary too, at least in public standards of stuff.

Re:Now hopefully...

[f0dder]

Tell that to Sun when they gutted their marketing department. I am sorry even Apple runs adverts 24/7 for their iPhone, iPod, Mac book pro. Every other blog is about Apple apple apple. It's no accident. I am sorry you are very wrong when you say Marketing pays for nothing.

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[account_deleted]

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