Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released a new beta of Firefox 4 this morning. Originally intended as a quick update for the feature-complete Beta 7 release, the new Beta includes 1415 bugfixes, a fine-tuned add-ons manager, improved WebGL support as well as URL bar enhancements."

Re:The only question I have is

[Wordplay]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html [mozillazine.org]

That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.

Re:The only question I have is

[trrichard]

It is in fact faster or as fast as chrome in version 4 from a javascript perspective, and it has always run on less ram. So it should be much snappier now.

Re:The only question I have is

[augustm]

It has been a turd since this summer, mostly due to the bug in the SQL code which
killed interactive performance. It was repaired this week and should make beta9. It
is also in recent 3.6 builds so mainline firefox is almost unbearable.

Meaningless javascript benchmarks are not very useful for this sort of bug- which
gives 10 second hangs when working with history or bookmarks.

Bug number 595530

Re:The only question I have is

[damien_kane]

The simplest solution is to turn of hdd-caching, but a more in-depth solution is to actually setup a RAMdrive and point your FFCache, IECache, and Windows Temp directories at that.

Unfortunately setting up a ramdrive is above the general public's scope of ability.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

You may wish to re-try this on FF 4. There has been significant work put in to reducing disk access in Firefox:

• Use sqlite's WAL to reduce fsyncs and disk writes [mozilla.org]
• Write cookie data to disk less frequently [mozilla.org]
• Fewer files opened on startup [mozilla.com]
• Fixed the SQLite page size to increase performance on Windows [mozilla.org]

There is also a tracking bug [mozilla.org] for bad I/O patterns available, so you can see what they're up to.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

as well as URL bar enhancements

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

As a long time Firefox user, this has been one of the most infuriating things, as they continually remove or fuck up useful features. The Mozilla developers seem obsessed with changing things just to make them different. The list of things they have eliminated or made less useful is almost endless. I'm sure they can give us all sorts of rationalizations for what they do, but it's all bullshit. Making things less useful is not an improvement.

I'm a Firefox developer. I understand that it can seem that way, but trust me, a lot of thought goes into each change we make. I'm not saying we are always right, or even always right for most people - nobody's perfect. But I do think that overall we do a good job, in picking what to change, and for the specific stuff you dislike, most of it should be configurable through prefs.

But, I realize that doesn't help you, and I'm sorry that some of our changes are not to your taste.

Re:URL Bar

[GreatBunzinni]

Yes, awesomebar IS that infuriating. Paralyzed by seeing options, no, but give us the option to turn off behavior we don't like. Is it THAT hard to do?

No, you only need to hit "edit"->"Preferences"->"Privacy" and in the "Location bar" section, where it says "when using the location bar, suggest:" just select "Nothing" from the dropdown menu.

Now that you know that, if it is that infuriating then how come you failed to even look at Firefox's preferences to disable it?

On the side note, I love the awesome bar. I configured it to display only bookmarked links (that option is also available in the dropdown menu I mentioned) and now, instead of clicking through multiple menus or, *ghasp*, use a search engine, I just hit Ctrl+L, type a couple of keys and voila: I'm opening the link. You say infuriating? I say godsend.