For Firefox 4, You'll Need To Wait Until 2011 238
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla said that it will not be releasing Firefox 4 RC, or the final version, before early 2011. Apparently, the bugfixes in the current beta take up much more time than anticipated. Mozilla is working on the feature freeze release Beta 7, which has 14 bugs left. The beta 7 is about six weeks behind schedule and will be released 'when it is ready,' according to Mozilla. It seems as if the original schedule, which estimated that Firefox 4 RC would be released in the second half of October was a bit too optimistic. Microsoft, by the way, released a new IE9 platform preview (PP6) at PDC 20910 today."
When it's done (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're a fan of Duke Nukem, I see.
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Nothing wrong with using it until it's done (as I have been for several months now, though not on this box).
Pepperidge Farms Remembers (Score:2)
Ayyup.
Nothing wrong at all.
*whittles*
They could just finish it and hold on to it too.
*rocks a bit more, snaps his galluses*
Ayyup.
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Only if you run Debian. *ducks* /bad joke
I think there is though. Only 14 bugs to squash until it's released to the wild, then there will be about 1400. Unless those 14 are showstoppers, you might as well release it, find the rest of the bugs, grab some news headlines and go from there. IE is making (good) waves again and Chrome is REALLY starting to come on strong, so you need something to keep the marketshare you have.
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The 14 bugs are blockers for a beta, not a final release. And yes, they're showstoppers for the beta, at least in part because there are supposed to be no API changes between beta and final.
Looking at the bugs, 7 are crashes that happen far too often, 1 a security bug, 1 a serious rendering regression that makes form controls disappear altogether in some cases, 2 are interface changes that are needed for Firebug to work with Firefox 4 (and have to happen before beta; see above), 1 a problem with rendering
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3DRealms said the same thing.
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Re:When it's done (Score:4, Insightful)
Theres nothing wrong with taking your time, but when you take a long time then still release a half-baked product, that is where the problem comes in.
Re:When it's done (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>Unless we're talking about Microsoft, in which any delay is castigated.
The delay of Vista was one of the best things for users. It's allowed me (and others too) to use the same XP computer for nearly ten years. Plus the occasional RAM upgrade (from 128 to 512K). What a great bargain that allowed me to save tons of money, and it reminds me of how I was able to use my Commodore Amiga for ten years without needing to upgrade.
Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to get 10 years out of my Windows 7 or OS10.6 machine, which is a shame because I'm used to driving things until they die. My TV is twenty years - my VCR 15 years - the cars are 25 years and 13 years respectively. I like to get my money out of the things I buy.
Re:When it's done (Score:4, Funny)
You ran XP with 512K of RAM? I assume there was no GUI and you had no drivers installed and you could only enter text by manually flipping bits through the serial port. :)
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I ran XP on 512K of RAM quite nicely, after a bunch of unnecessary services were turned off. I was even able to afford such niceties as active desktop and font smoothing.
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512K != 512MB
Ah... yeah, I did indeed miss that.
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>>>You ran XP with 512K of RAM?
No. I ran XP with 128K of RAM. That's the recommended spec (minimum is 64k). ----- And right now I have XP with 512K and it runs just fine. Hell even Seven can run with only 512K (but not vista).
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I think we have an order of magnitude problem here... K != M
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Yeah, at first I thought it was a typo, but it appears commodore64_love really doesn't know the difference between kilobytes and megabytes.
Old versions of MS-DOS ran under 512KB of RAM. Windows XP requires, I believe, 64MB of RAM. Slight difference there.
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I have a modern OS that fits on a 1440 K floppy. ;-)
Still won't fit inside a 1/2 meg of RAM though.
http://wiki.kolibrios.org/ [kolibrios.org]
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Ooops. I see what I did there. I mean 512 M of RAM.
Just you wait! Someday you too will be in your senile 40s, start thinking that Synthesized/Electronic Disco is the latest style of music, and that computers still use kilobytes
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They DO use kilobytes, just a lot more of them. :-)
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Yes. And apparently Synthesized/electronic music IS in style. Again.
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Not every likes his OS to be a bloat-galore fest.
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You really need to look into Ubuntu. With its more efficient use of hardware resources and its strategy of nearly-automatic upgrades (and of course its ease of installation), it would be very easy to get another decade of use from that old WinXP hardware.
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Oh Slashdot, where making an appropriate Duke Nukem reference gets you modded as a troll.
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I finally got tired of FF 3.6 causing my entire windows 7 Pro x64 PC to slow to a crawl after running a few hours so this last weekend I looked to see if they had released a 64 bit version and sure enough...they haven't. Fortunately Vector 64 [vector64.com] took the time to recompile the source and I was able to download and install it. Getting the Beta Flash [adobe.com] (Square) drivers from Adobe wasn't too hard. They work well but YMMV. I run Greasemonkey [mozilla.org] with numerous scripts and all seem to be working as expected. I have had it
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What's amazing is how it has been progressively heavier, but yet loses functionality. There's no bookmark/cookie/password sync anymore (which was really nice in Netscape), no email or nntp support, and with Firefox 4, gopher:// [gopher] will be gone too. And don't suggest using plugins for the lost functionality -- that will lead to an even bigger footprint.
Code bloat attacks pretty much any long-lived app that isn't controlled by one or two people, but Firefox has bloated more than most apps. Sure, it has many n
Re:Memory hogging, CPU hogging. (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody remember if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:4, Informative)
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Do they run Flash?
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:4, Informative)
Flash 10.2 is 64 bit. Preview 2 is already out. :)
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There have been very usable flash 64-bit linux betas available for download for quite some time.
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Ironically, there's 64-bit Flash for Linux, but not Windows. Theoretically, a 64-bit version for Windows wouldn't take too much work, but look how long Adobe took in producing a proper 64-bit Photoshop.
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How many addons do you have for it?
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Huh? The vast majority of addons for FF are built with Javascript and XUL. They're entirely platform agnostic.
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So then what 64 bit browser is he using that makes these agnostic addons easy to add?
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Uh. Firefox. I've had 64-bit FF running on my Ubuntu laptop for over a year, now. Add-ons work fine. *Plugins* can be tricky, but the common ones, Flash and Java, both have 64-bit versions.
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I disabled "Add-on compatibility checking"
Even though a few of them show as incompatible, they seem to work normally.
The exceptions are Xmarks & Web Developer which don't seem to behave.
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I think you meant plugins.
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Java integration: if you want to run a 64 bit JVM for your plugins then you want a 64-bit browser.
Better Flash support: 64-bit flash plugin runs better than the 32-bit version on a 64-bit platform.
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:4, Funny)
How else will Firefox address more than 4GB of memory? What, your Firefox doesn't use that much memory?
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Sorry...I'll correct my post:
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And I usually have roughly 30 tabs open for months on end.
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Why would you need a 64-bit native browser?
So I don't need to have 32-bit libraries on disk wasting space? Not to mention the performance improvements to be had with a proper 64-bit jit'ing JS engine (don't underestimate the power of a larger register set).
Re:Anybody remember if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you need a 64-bit native browser?
So I don't need to have 32-bit libraries on disk wasting space? Not to mention the performance improvements to be had with a proper 64-bit jit'ing JS engine (don't underestimate the power of a larger register set).
This. I would hate to see a distant future where we still use i386 binary browsers with compatibility layers on top of compatibility layers on top of compatibility layers, just because no browser needs more than 4GB.
No kidding (Score:3, Interesting)
And we need the move to happen sooner rather than later if we want a hope of ditching the compatibility any time soon. Even if every app went 64-bit today, it would be years and years before an OS could realistically jettison the 32-bit layer, because people would need to keep running older apps. So it would be good to get on this shit now rather than later so maybe in a decade or two we can get rid of the 32-bit layers.
As an example of how long this shit can stay around if you don't work at it, look at the
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the nightlys have a x86-64 version for windows, linux and mac
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ [mozilla.org]
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And this latest one is actually stable again. They fixed a lot of the JVM issues they've had over the past few weeks, and the fixes finally trickled all the way down to the main nightly trunk builds.
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There is a 64bit version of the current one. Been using it for years.
Chrome (Score:4, Funny)
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Great Zip? (Score:2)
...at PDC 20910 today.
Isn't that 90210?
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What? No, PDC was in Silver Spring, MD!
IE6 Exclusively (Score:3, Funny)
I'm one of the 4.5% of the users out there who STILL use it and say sorry, but IE6 is browser for me!
we know all about it (Score:5, Funny)
a couple of thousand of us have been watching you surf since one of the many bored hackers decided to install the streaming remote desktop on your pc about 5 months ago just for fun. how do you get any work done with all those pop ups?
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No! Never! I use Netscape Navigator 2.0! This Browser War isn't over yet!
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I use Netscape Navigator 9.
What? It's only two years old. (cough)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Netscape9.png [wikimedia.org]
Depends on what "beta" means... (Score:5, Interesting)
You could have predicted this lateness because the Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days". I've been using Minefield on and off for several months and it got a lot less stable once it hit the "beta" stage, about the same time that they started changing a bunch of things and adding a bunch of features. Before it went to "beta" it had been fine for a long time, but several times since the beta stage I've had to revert to 3.6.
Yes, I realize I'm using nightlies and should expect bugs, etc, but the traditional definition (not that it is relevant any more) of "beta test" is that the software is basically complete and is being tested for stability and regression, _not_ that it is in a mode where new features are being added on a weekly basis.
I'm looking forward to Firefox 4 and am sure it will be good overall when it's finally done, but the progress in this period of development has not filled me with a lot of confidence that this will be any time soon.
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The new definition of "Beta" is "I have enough users to come across more bugs in 1 night than I would if I were to try and test it all by myself all week".
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And beta is the absolute deadline for ALL the new features. You just saw the effect of 1000 independent commits right before the beta deadline. As long as it's half broken AND in there, they have to fix it for the final release and it becomes a new feature! I don't know if that's really how it works - but it sounds pretty likely.
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Firefox uses the "beta" name to encourage early adopters to use it so they can help find bugs by sending crash reports and usage statistics.
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>>>Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days". I've been using Minefield... and it got a lot less stable once it hit the "beta" stage
That's weird. I've been using SeaMonkey, based upon the same mozilla/gecko core, and its beta is rock solid. I haven't been able to crash it, or even slow it down by watching lots of youtube videos.
Re:Depends on what "beta" means... (Score:4, Informative)
>>>Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days". I've been using Minefield... and it got a lot less stable once it hit the "beta" stage
That's weird. I've been using SeaMonkey, based upon the same mozilla/gecko core, and its beta is rock solid. I haven't been able to crash it, or even slow it down by watching lots of youtube videos.
Mozilla's "Beta" is different from Minefield. Minefield is the nightlies where they test new things and is meant for the benefit of developers and masochists: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/ [mozilla.org]
Betas might have bugs, but they're meant to mostly work. Minefield might work, but it's meant to mostly have bugs.
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You could have predicted this lateness because the Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days".
I think you're confusing cause and effect. You could argue that early on they mismanaged the scope of the project and therefore set unrealistic expectations, but so far as I've seen, the build monikers themselves (alpha, beta, nightly, RC, etc.) have proven to have surprisingly little to do with the actual readiness of the code.
Rather I would say you could have predicted this lateness based on a quick gander at a historical trend showing the number of bugs that are being found, fixed and remain on a daily b
WebGL / Canvas is really exciting! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've wanted a way to draw in a browser - I mean really draw, not just use divs as pixels - for a long time now. Finally it's here! WebGL is really smooth now, I've been watching it in the latest minefield builds. Some guy in IRC posted a demo city drawing that had 24k faces and still rendered smooth as silk. 2d drawing on a canvas is also very nice - very easy to use.
This is the dawn of a new era of killer web content. My guess - within two years, WebGL will be the highest paying job in web dev.
A few more months is nothing, I've been waiting years for this ;-)
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Shit. In the past I've been able to avoid most of the worst web designs just by disabling flash. Now it's part of html itself. This will only encourage web designers to build flashy unusable ones rather than simple, easily read ones. Go progress.
Re:WebGL / Canvas is really exciting! (Score:4, Informative)
If it’s that much of an issue, just adblock the canvas tag with ##canvas. Plus you can do it on a site-by-site basis if you like.
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It hasn't been much of an issue in the past, because most sane web developers know that flash isn't necessarily supported or installed on many desktops. With all this flashy stuff being stuck in HTML proper, there's less of a reason not to use it. I expect browsing the web to become a much busier, bewildering visual experience, and blocking canvas to make very large chunks of the web unusable.
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Like I said, you can narrow it down on a site-by-site basis. You could also block specific canvas tags using more complex element hiding rules.
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I've wanted a way to draw in a browser - I mean really draw, not just use divs as pixels - for a long time now. Finally it's here! WebGL is really smooth now, I've been watching it in the latest minefield builds. Some guy in IRC posted a demo city drawing that had 24k faces and still rendered smooth as silk. 2d drawing on a canvas is also very nice - very easy to use.
This is the dawn of a new era of killer web content. My guess - within two years, WebGL will be the highest paying job in web dev.
Indeed. Only it'll be the second highest paying job. The most highest paying one would be developing ad blockers that can detect HTML5 canvas and WebGL ads... ~
Re:WebGL / Canvas is really exciting! (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's exploits you're looking for, I doubt WebGL is a good vector for attack. It's a relatively small finite API. Where are you going to attack? Vertex and fragment data is only handled at all inside a shader - which you must supply. Good luck breaking out of that box. Any obvious attacks like resource over-allocation will likely be squashed quickly.
Compare this with the video spec, which has a huge abstraction right in the middle of it. This opens up any attack vectors that are already in the supported codecs.
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If it's exploits you're looking for, I doubt WebGL is a good vector for attack. It's a relatively small finite API. Where are you going to attack?
Well and good, as long as it’s limited to that.
I remember hearing about a SecondLife virus that spread via an infected QuickTime .MOV embedded in a “picture frame” in the game. IIRC, you didn’t even have to look at the surface onto which the video file was embedded; it could infect the user as soon as they loaded the map.
It’s little stuff like this that makes it easy to miss these infection points. Building a limited API for 3D graphics is well and good but then you extend it t
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WebGL doesn't support video on a texture. It's based on GL ES (embedded) and has a limited set of functionality, even in GL terms.
Well, I suppose you could fake it with a texture atlas, but that would require exploit in PNG or JPEG, which probably would be noticed elsewhere too :-P
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exploit in PNG or JPEG, which probably would be noticed elsewhere too
Well, hopefully they’ve found most of those, but I remember hearing about a few of those in the past too.
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Not at all acting "high and mighty". It's just - this is not related to WebGL. At all.
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That being said, you’ve still got to deal with the small possibility that the codec be broken out of its sandbox with a privilege escalation exploit.
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Hell, the hackers could have just embedded the mov as an <object>/<embed> in a web page and emailed URLs to a bunch of people in spam for the same effect.
You might think... but the target groups would be different and probably not completely overlapping.
Neither the RC nor the final version? (Score:5, Funny)
Be bold: release the final version before the release candidate. You can release the final version on schedule in 2010, and then slip the RC to 2011. That's the kind of innovative software development methodology we should expect from Mozilla.
Use nightlies (Score:5, Informative)
I encourage everyone using beta 6 to use the nightly version (http://nightly.mozilla.org/) as their main FF experience. The JS is 10 times faster on most public benchmarks and the boomarks and profile data are not affected even when switching back and forth between 4.0 and 3.6.
I have both installed: 3.6 that comes with my Linux distro and 4.0 unzipped in my home folder and being updated every morning automatically.
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Only 14 bugs? (Score:3, Insightful)
One hopes that this version ... (Score:2)
... doesn't foul up your printing parameters like most of the previous "upgrades" have managed to do. 'Cuz I just love tracking down all of my saved passwords and rebuilding my FF configuration from scratch after an upgrade turns all of the fonts on my printed webpages into something that looks like they were taken from an old CGA adapter's output.
Worst. Betas. Ever. (Score:2)
Checklist so far, from beta1 to beta6:
- Disk Trashing. A lot. To death. No fix.
- Cookies eating. All erased. Randomly. No fix.
- Very few extensions ready. Raw back Firefox riding. Valkyrie needs extensions, badly. Can't use it.
"Back to Firefox 3", is it the only way ?
(Firefox4 progress looks like Vista's).
2011?! (Score:3, Funny)
That's literally two months away!! OMG how could a software release schedule ever be allowed to slip by two months? What will the retailers do now that it won't be on shelves in time for Christmas?!
I just hope it's not too far into January. Especially not Jan 31. The flying car from the magazine ad I ordered back in 1972 was scheduled for delivery on that day.
-1 silly.
PP6? (Score:2)
>"Microsoft, by the way, released a new IE9 platform preview (PP6) at PDC 20910 today."
Kewl? Does it run on any other platform besides MS-Windows yet?
17 bugs! (Score:3, Informative)
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So... Are you saying chrome is FireFox 4.0, or that chrome allows for time travel?
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So... Are you saying chrome is FireFox 4.0, or that chrome allows for time travel?
Um, let me check my Charlie Chaplin DVD collection and I'll get right back to you on the time travel bit ;-)
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Chrome is definitely faster and more stable on a Mac than FF 3.6. The FF4 beta 6 is just about at parity; there was a huge difference halfway through the betas once they sandboxed Flash.
I've been very happy with beta 6, and imagine the final release will be pretty solid.
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No, no. It rolls over from 2009 to 20010
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