Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 Released 190
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."
Now hopefully... (Score:1, Interesting)
...it can win some marketshare back from that company whose business is to track everything one does on the Web.
Re:I'll never let go, Firefox. I'll never let go. (Score:1, Interesting)
I am all for faster browsers. As it will allow for more interesting interactive applications. But lets face it folks we are 99% of the time waiting on things to download. That is the major bottleneck. It is measurable. Webpage render time is such a small part of what I do on the internet its not even factored in. Someday it may be.
Let me put this into perspective. I will pick one of the slowest part of our computers, the hard drive. The current average seems to be 30-80 MB per second. Average web speed in the united states? About 80k per second (DSL 1.5 meg). Some have it better at 300k to 5 MB per second depending on where you live and how much your willing to pay for it. Now lets say you have one of the 'good' connections at 5MB per second, and assume you can get full use out of it from some web server (not likely). You are still anywhere from 6-20x slower than the slowest part of your computer.
I put in a proxy server so I could measure what I am doing on the internet. Between me and my GF we waited for nearly 28 hours last month on things to download from the internet or about 14 hours each. We downloaded between the two of us 16 gig of stuff. So for 8 gig of data I waited 14 hours. My connection if it was maxed out would have downloaded all 16 gig in about 6 hours. To do the same thing off my HD would have been a few mins. Also remember I had a proxy server in the mix here. So this time would be even bigger (about 10%).
Re:Option to use the old UI? (Score:1, Interesting)
Look, I know UI designers are all in love with mobile phones and tablets these days, because that's what all the cool kids are playing with.
But the machine I'm running on has a mouse and an OS, and that OS displays title bars in every window it opens. It's a UI standard for most mouse-and-keyboard-based OSes, and I'd really appreciate it if you UI/UX folks would stop fucking with it.
Don't even get me started on ribbons. Cutesy little icons without words aren't a way to improve the user experience, they're a hack that makes localization cheaper, because you don't have to hire translators.