Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month 266
Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."
Dumbed down (Score:3, Insightful)
It's slower to use now because quick options and quick information have been removed. Also, hovering over URLs now squeezes the URL to be visited into the URL box with the current URL, unreadable light coloured fonts have been chosen and for most URLs you can barely read a fraction of the URL - It's dreadful. Plus right-click -> block image has been removed.
What next? Quit trying to copy Chrome and IE if I wanted to use those corporate straitjackets I would be.
Re:This didn't release yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a while, I maintained that I would switch back to Firefox once it matched the speed and minimalist interface that Chrome had, as I didn't like using a browser from Google.
You know there ARE more than 2 choices, right?
Did you consider Opera?
Re:I sure hope... (Score:4, Insightful)
With "Panorama" aka "Tab Candy" aka "Bolted on tab management feature that only power users need", I'm not so sure. :-(
Re:This didn't release yet? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, and neither did anyone else. Move on, already.
Re:I sure hope... (Score:4, Insightful)
but once they got a good market share and user appreciation, it became bloatware.
Some people call it "bloat", other people call it features that they asked for and find useful.
Seriously, if you want a stripped down / light-weight browser, there are other options.
Re:This didn't release yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't this supposed to be the answer to Chrome - yet Chrome has shipped several iterations in the time it took them to get from 3 to 4?
Version numbers mean absolutely nothing; they only determine important milestones... or, in Chrome's case, pure marketing by making several "releases" painted as milestones, when in reality they're all quite minor updates. Firefox has a much more stable (and less confusing) version numbering system.
No Status Bar = FAIL (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you can get an add-on to replace it.
But that requires each and every user to look for and install something that should already be there!
For the developers to take the status bar completely out... that's just ridiculous.
At the very least, put a little check box in the options page to turn it back on.
Re:Missing menu bar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:how (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to phase out the status bar, and they figured not providing that functionality was for the best
Wow, that's simply awful. The status bar is there for a reason. Do they really want people following links with even less information than they have now? If my browser is stalling out trying to load a page, how will I know what domain to block?
Looks like Mozilla is continuing to dumb down its user interface. Is there a browser around that targets the geek market? One for those of us who want more information and more control?
Re:I sure hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its NOT the seamonkey model; unlike opera, mozilla, seamonkey etc, it doesnt have built in mail, torrent, ftp (at least not worth mentioning), an HTTP server (opera...), newsreader, etc.
Its JUST a browser, like its always been.
And I raise a motion that all complaining that 3.0 is too slow and bloaty, should be forced to use version 1.0 or 1.5 or 2.0, and see just how slow they really are when used with modern expectations of heavy duty JS, 30 some tabs, and zillions of extensions. I seem to recall an AWFUL lot of complaining from days of yore about 1.0 and 1.5's memory usage and bloat.
What is it they say, "the grass is always greener..."?
Status bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla, like all market centric organisations, does not care about technical features, usefulness, usability or technical competence. Like all such companies, they care about only one thing--the latest fad. They will follow this fad, be it graphical, academic, ergonomic and they will follow it regardless of its effect, positive or negative, on their overall product.
Mostly, these fads are graphical: Moving menus and status bars, button redesign, interface overhaul, theme redesign and countless other features that are of use or interest only to the 0.1% of users who are even remotely interested in design or aesthetics. The rest of us simply have to put up with them, confusing and unhelpful as they are.
Often, the fad is ergonomic. The latest brain fart from an inexperienced school of 20-something UI "experts" simply _must_ be implemented, because it is the latest "best practice" or "modern interface". The MS Office Ribbon is the pinnacle of this kind of fad, and shows how destructive and unhelpful following it can be. No doubt the status bar offended the creed of the latest generation of UI prodigies and had to be done away with. The same with tabs on top. Most people are in reality confused, perturbed and frustrated by these kinds of unhelpful changes, but organisations implement them anyway. I suspect largely to keep their otherwise useless UI design teams in employment.
Sometimes, the fads are academic. The self signed cert debacle being the primary example. Users were deprived of convenient working encryption because encryption without authentication was declared worse than unencrypted connections by fiat. Some useless academic process had not been followed because of the myth in the middle.
Basically, the development of Firefox is not done with the interests of users in mind. It is done with the interests of experts too many opinions on how things should be done, and not enough willingness to compromise or listen to feedback. Mercifully however, we still have extensions, so the worst meddling can be successfully undone. Pity the users of Chrome then.