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Firefox 4 RC1 Released 189

IgnitusBoyone writes "Mozilla has now released Firefox 4 RC1. For most beta participants the update should be automatic, but for those holding out until it gets closer to feature freeze, now is likely a good time to test the next major release. Aside from a complete redesign of the user interface, Firefox 4 offers several new features (release notes) including an integrated sync manager, improved methods for tab-switching and organization for tab-heavy users."
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Firefox 4 RC1 Released

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  • UI is still sluggish (Score:2, Interesting)

    by devxo ( 1963088 )
    It looks like they made Firefox look exactly like Chrome. However, there is one problem - Firefox's UI still feels sluggish, just like before. Personally I love how fast Opera's UI is and it makes the browser feel lightweight too. Chrome is close to that, but both IE and Firefox lag behind. Maybe it's XUL or something else, but it needs to be improved.

    Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 video
    • HTML5 H.264 videos

      Where? The only site is Youtube, and it's beta and for testing. Name a site with over 10000 visits per html5 video that has regular support for HTML5 h264 video.

      I'll give you a hint, it's a loaded question because no sane site advertises full support for this because it's not a set standard yet!

      • by devxo ( 1963088 )
        Well, YouTube for example. If you stream using iPhone, you get H.264. In fact, you get H.264 even with the normal flash player.
      • With that logic, the Internet doesn't exist.

        HTML5 is an emerging standard. You're argument is it can't be because the world doesn't look like what didn't exist. WTF? I don't think you understand how technology adoption works.

        YouTube is an extremely huge chunk of the online video market. WebM is finally becoming available on hardware. Future generation hardware is likely to provide yet additional performance boosts. Video quality has achieved parity with H.264. WebM is faster to decode than H.264 and likely

      • Engadget, Slashgear, and quite a few other gadget blogs. They only supply it if your user agent is a non-desktop string (iPad/Pod/Phone, Android), of course, but they have it available.

      • blip.tv
    • by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

      Not for long though, google chrome [engadget.com] is also dropping this patent trap.

      • Not for long though, google chrome is also dropping this patent trap.

        This raises a question: why do browsers need to support particular codecs? Media players use those installed in the system; why don't browsers?

    • by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Work has a Hudson server set up for automated tests. It's godawful slow with firefox 3, so I gave it a try with Chrome. Chrome is just ridiculously faster with it. It's usable with Firefox 4, but there are still places where the browser just freezes up for a second or two. So far I'm just using chrome for that Hudson server, but it wouldn't take much for Chrome to unseat Firefox as my default browser, and I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember.
    • It looks like they made Firefox look exactly like Chrome. However, there is one problem - Firefox's UI still feels sluggish, just like before.

      and yet if I install Chromium alongside it, pages still actually load faster in Firefox than in Chrome. I don't know what Google is doing instead of trying to load the page right away but I don't like it.

      Does Notscripts work correctly yet? I might try actually doing regular testing of Chromium again if so.

      • by Kosi ( 589267 )

        If you want all the features of Chrome without the nasty stuff Google put in, try SRWare Iron.

        • If you want all the features of Chrome without the nasty stuff Google put in, try SRWare Iron.

          Iron has all the same features, except that it sends you to some useless add-on market with like 10% of the stuff that's in the real add-on repo. They might turn stuff off by default but it's just an outdated build of Chromium for Windows. And BTW, I run Linux. I could run Iron under Wine but that would be dumb. Your clue was that I said "chromium" repeatedly.

          • by Kosi ( 589267 )

            Ooops, I missed that. :) And you're right, that they send you to that other place for extensions is not good, the second thing I dislike in Iron so far (the first is that there is no autoupdate function, but as Google chose to do that with their stupid updater service, and not inside the browser like FF, that would require a more extensive coding).

            • Having update code inside the browser would lead to the same obnoxiousness that firefox has-- non admin users getting pestered to update, and then unable to actually perform said update (as the browser would be running as a non-admin user).

              Having the updater running under an admin account seperate from the browser makes a lot of sense, as the updates actually are applied regularly (again, unlike firefox where out of date browsers are QUITE common).

              • by Kosi ( 589267 )

                Obviously such a function needs to be de-/selectable in the options. At least they could implement a "check for updates" button or menu option, eliminating the steps needed to manually download and install a new version, which is a PITA when you look at the speed in which new versions pop out.

                And, except for corporate environments with stupid IT management forbidding timely updates and/or lazy admins, why do you think outdated FFs are that common? Let's face the truth, the common home user still works under

        • by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @10:50AM (#35443390)

          I dont understand this. People want to use Google's product, but dont trust the company (who incidentally has a pretty clear "heres what we do with your data, and how to disable it in chrome). So instead of grabbing the open source Chromium and unticking the "send my data to Google" boxes, you go to a completely unvetted third party who claims "we've removed the nasty bits, and did some unspecified tweaking to make it faster and better!" and download their binaries? Which, I note, have no source code available to actually check?

          What makes you think SRWare is trustworthy? Wheres THEIR privacy policy, I note their site doesnt even list one? Has anyone actually audited the thing to make sure its not leaking info to SRWare?

          I dont know about you, but Id much rather just untick chrome's "send my info to Google" option boxes than trust some unknown 3rd party with neither history nor published privacy policy.

    • by supersloshy ( 1273442 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @09:31AM (#35442382)

      Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

      Um... wget/curl? Any download manager + VLC/MPlayer? It's not hard. There's a million different ways to play H.264-encoded content outside of Firefox. Inside, though, I'm sure it's possible to write a plugin that replaces embedded H.264 HTML5 tags with an external player (like Microsoft did).

      Regardless of the possible workarounds, this isn't a battle of functionality, this is a battle of rights. Mozilla isn't supporting H.264 even if it's a system codec because it wants to make sure that all Firefox forks and related projects can use the codecs without fear of patent infringement. Then there's also patent licensing and things like that, which are a huge hurdle for open source software in the USA. VLC, for example, is based in France so there's no fear of patent infringement (software patents don't exist over there). Firefox/Mozilla is based in the USA, so anything that they distribute must be legal. Including H.264 would cost Mozilla $5,000,000 per year, content creators would still have to pay license fees (eventually) for H.264-encoded content, and any and all forks/related projects of Firefox would not be able to include H.264 without breaking the law (unless they're based where software patents don't exist).

      Mozilla supports WebM/Theora/Vorbis not for technical reasons; it supports them for ideological and economic reasons. I completely agree with their decision and I hope that software patents are abolished in the USA as well someday so we can get H.264 playback... :/

    • The RC certainly starts up a lot quicker than the latest 3.x release, which was so slow it was actually comical (the other day my boss and I stood and laughed while we waited the ~30 s for Firefox to start up).

    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      Chrome and Opera don't have H.264 either by default. On Windows Microsoft allows you to install something which makes Firefox have H.264 (Windows includes a license for H.264 supposedly, but Microsoft is part of that 'band of brothers' anyway).

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • For example I bet if you were to go over the MozDev blogs before Chrome you wouldn't see squat written about plugin sandboxing, maybe as a long term possibility, but nothing definite, same with JavaScript benchmarks and radical speedups.

        I don't know about plugin sandboxing, but the rest is definitely not true. Mozilla already had nightly (or possibly beta builds) showcasing radical Javascript speedups before Chrome was announced. And that meant a faster UI too, thanks to that being written in Javascript.

        T

    • by pugugly ( 152978 )

      Actually, I abhor the minimalist chrome 'hide everything useful' interface, and I'm finding this one okay so far - I can see the similarity in style, but it's substantially better version of it.

      Pug

  • FF 4 is nice so far (Score:4, Informative)

    by click2005 ( 921437 ) * on Thursday March 10, 2011 @08:43AM (#35441996)

    I have to say that so far I'm very impressed. Once I'd moved the tabs and buttons back to where I like them it was great. Memory usage is much better and the speed compared to 3.x is incredible. Sync is nice as you can run your own server.

    I prefer the old buttons and liked having a status bar but i'm sure somebody will create add-ons to fix that.

    • by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @09:04AM (#35442152)

      I prefer the old buttons and liked having a status bar but i'm sure somebody will create add-ons to fix that.

      Status-4-Evar [mozilla.org]

    • by devent ( 1627873 )

      the speed compared to 3.x is incredible

      I tried FF4 and the sites are loading as fast as in FF3. What have you done so that you can browse the web faster?

      • Some sites I visit often took a few seconds to create menus and are almost instant now. Its probably more to do with JavaScript speed though.

      • My Linux install doesn't yet have FF 4.0 on it because I can't be bothered to install it, but the 3.6 version is really, really slow no matter where I go compared with 4.0 on my Windows install. I suppose it could be due to the different OSes, but I doubt that very much. That's FF3.6 with basically no add ins installed and 4.0 with noscript, ghostery and a couple other ones.

        Not sure what might be up with yours if you're not seeing a difference.

        • by devent ( 1627873 )
          The first post was a joke because I couldn't care less if some stupid JavaScript runs 500ms faster or not. Normally I deactivated all JS anyway and I'm in the web to read text not to play some JS games. So since the new FF4 won't download anything faster I'm always very uninterested with the penis comparisons of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft.

          Not sure what might be up with yours if you're not seeing a difference.

          Maybe I don't have a broken computer? I have been running FF3 on Fedora 14 on a Asus Netbook with Intel card and Atom CPU, a Notebook from Lenovo with Intel and 4 core

          • by Homburg ( 213427 )

            Normally I deactivated all JS anyway

            Not if you're using Firefox, you didn't - Firefox is written in Javascript, so speeding up the Javascript engine should speed up Firefox itself, as well as JS on webpages.

    • FF4 on linux, using the .mozilla folder setting directly from iceweasel 3.5 recognized history, cookies, flash, noscript and video downloadhelper extensions, shows the statusbar at the right place and keeps the custom UI font. The only thing I'm waiting for is... er... the red cats theme.

      I hope the UI changes made on windows will be easily reversible on all platforms.

      And it hasn't crashed by browsing slashdot which is likely a good test...

    • Memory usage is much better and the speed compared to 3.x is incredible.

      Oh hell yes. It's become downright usable... average memory usage has dropped from 800MB to 450MB... I'm ecstatic. :)

  • if you want all you extensions to work. Half of them will be disabled in the new version because their authors haven't had time to release a version that this particular version of FF4 will accept. I suggest waiting until FF4 becomes mainstream if you want the transition to be seamless.

    If you don't care that much about extensions however, go right ahead: FF4 is *great*: it's quick and less memory hungry, if nothing else. I've been loving it since it came out.

    • Adblock has worked for at least the past 3 betas, and that's the one I care about.

    • by RobbieThe1st ( 1977364 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @08:55AM (#35442084)

      Power users -really- use FF -without- disabling compatibility checking? Amazing.
      I've been using FF4 nightlies with "incompatible" add-ons for over a year, now... Most work fine, occasionally something wont, but that's usually fixed by getting a beta from the addon author's site.

    • by Kosi ( 589267 )

      I switched when the beta 10 was released. Most of my extensions worked right away, especially the vital ones (Adblock Plus, NoScript). For some, like Firebug or FEBE, I had to switch to the dev/beta version. The only thing I really missed was Extended Statusbar, but it just took some time. And I found a better cookie extension (Cookie Monster), because I didn't want to wait for an update for my old one (Cookie Culler).

    • This is a really weird thing, to me. It happens *every* major version of Firefox release, too, and usually results in some addons being abandoned and replaced by one that supports the new version. I'm an addon developer and my extension has had support since the betas were available to set as a version in addons.mozilla.org. There's been plenty of time, and I doubt they've been breaking addons *that* often.

      • by Lennie ( 16154 )

        Jetpack (Mozilla's new development system for addons) solves these problems. It gives addon developers a stable API.

        Users don't need to restart when installing addons either.

    • Tab Mix Plus works, NoScript works, ABP works, Grab and Drag works, Fox to Phone works... all without turning off compatibility checks. I'd say they're doing pretty well...

    • The long beta cycle for Firefox 4 has paid off in this regard, and the majority of add-ons [mozilla.org] are already compatible. Pretty much every popular add-on already works well in Firefox 4.
  • by C_amiga_fan ( 1960858 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @08:48AM (#35442032)

    RC is scheduled for later this month.
    (But of course there won't be a / vertisement for it.) SeaMonkey 2.1 final will be based on Gecko 2.0.1

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I've been using FF4 since about beta 7. I really hope they got the stability issues fixed, especially with Tab Candy, which has been quite glitchy for me during the betas.

    Chrome still *feels* snappier, but the JavaScript tests I performed showed them about equal for the most part.

    Chrome's WebGL is faster, but glitchier (re-draw issues with non-webgl components on the screen?).

    Either way, it's an awesome product. I use FF4 and Chrome daily, so it's not like I am "choosing" one or the other. Both are stell

  • I've been using FF4 since one of the earlier betas (I think beta 4?) and so I've seen the new features as it comes in. Is it me or does a lot of the new features, especially the UI features seem completely unnecessary? I've only used app-tabs maybe once and Panorama twice just to see what they do, and after that, I completely disregarded them. I haven't used Sync at all. Is this experience common with other Firefox power users? Or am I just being a bit of a Luddite in not using them?

    • Re:Feature Bloat (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @09:16AM (#35442242) Journal

      For that matter, Firefox 2.x was just about as feature complete as you'd want a browser to be. All they really needed to do was fix the memory issues and keep the rendering engine up to date, but I guess we can't have nice things.

      • Re:Feature Bloat (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sonny Yatsen ( 603655 ) * on Thursday March 10, 2011 @09:23AM (#35442312) Journal

        Firefox suffers from its constant desire to meet or beat Chrome and the gajillion UI features Google throws into the browser every other day. It's too bad, really, because it's gone way off-mission. I'll still use it over Chrome, any day (because I don't trust a company that makes its money by tracking my web movements and my web browsing habits to keep its mitts off of my web movements and browsing habits), but I don't recommend Firefox as enthusiastically as I used to back in the day.

        • by egoots ( 557276 )

          Firefox suffers from its constant desire to meet or beat Chrome and the gajillion UI features Google throws into the browser every other day. .

          The perception is that if they don't keep up, they will lose market share. Maybe you or I don't want them, but all the people who make noise and write reviews and articles compare all these things and pan them if Feature X is not there.

          You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't (add features) these days

      • That memory leak was fixed a long time ago. And by that I mean since at least Firefox 3.5. I realize that trolls seem to think otherwise, but as of Firefox 3.5 it was beating the crap out of chrome and most of the other browsers in terms of memory allocation. Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage [dotnetperls.com] As far as the rendering engine goes, it's stable, they're working on it and it's getting better but they have to worry a lot more than the Google folks do about pissing off a large user base by making substantial ch

        • by Hatta ( 162192 )

          That memory leak was fixed a long time ago. And by that I mean since at least Firefox 3.5.

          Yeah I know. I was talking about Firefox 2.x. Reading comprehension, learn it.

    • To be fair, there are a lot of things that could be considered "feature bloat" in a browser. The download manager, bookmarks, heck, even tabs could be bloat depending on how you look at it. Tab Groups was included because Firefox knows that it has a large share of power users as well as normal users. For those people with hundreds of tabs, Tab Groups are a godsend. For those who rarely go over 5, simply don't use it. While you might say that this is better as an add-on than a default feature (and to a point

    • Panorama might be useful if you have 23237234 tabs open, otherwise yes, it's just a waste of time and space that belongs in an extension rather than bloating Firefox. App-tabs are dumb because websites aren't designed like that, when you open another site from that site the metaphor breaks. It's the reason why Jolicloud Linux is dumb. (Including netbook fixes is good; the HTML5 launcher is 'tarded.) I don't use Sync at all and before I didn't use an extension which handles Sync.

      On the other hand, I am runni

      • I happen to like app tabs. The name sucks, but the functionality of putting commonly used tabs off to the side with only their icon cleans up some space on the tab bar. It's best if you don't think of it as an app tab, but a "stored" tab.

        • I'm willing to accept that some people find it useful but I'm not willing to accept that it belongs in the core. The functionality for tabs is in the core; App Tabs should be an Add-On, like say All-In-One-Sidebar (one of my very favorite add-ons) or Scrapbook+ (which is extra-slow to bring up its menu but still works in FF4 via nightly tester tools.) I love Firefox and load tons of extensions, but not within orders of magnitude as many as I don't load. App Tabs is just one more thing I wouldn't load.

      • I actually like Panorama. I don't typically use it, but when I'm doing research online, I can send items that I think I'm going to want to bookmark to their own tab group and then just bookmark all those pages in that tab group while excluding the ones that aren't related.

        The feature is new enough, that I don't think most of us have really come up with how to use it maximally. I just wish that they would add a default name to each new tab group so that I didn't have to immediately go in and give it a name.

      • Depends on your fglrx version apparently.
        And for intel, your mesa version.
        I was getting crashes in the webgl test suite with my intel card until I updated the machine to Natty Narwhale.
        Mesa in that version is apparently fixed.

        My fglrx works fine in Maverick with the test suite. Has never crashed.
        Use the environment variable MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1

        You can add it to /etc/profiles.d or whatever your distro equivalent is if your results are good.

        https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/s [khronos.org]

      • Panorama might be useful if you have 23237234 tabs open, otherwise yes, it's just a waste of time and space that belongs in an extension rather than bloating Firefox.

        Exactly how is it bloating Firefox? Is it a huge UI distraction? No, I don't think so, it's buried in a submenu. Does the code for Panorama slow down Firefox in any meaningful way when it is not being used? I don't think so. Is the code adding megabytes to the executable? Somehow I doubt it.

        I think by bloat you mean "I don't use it so nobody

    • by DrXym ( 126579 )

      I've been using FF4 since one of the earlier betas (I think beta 4?) and so I've seen the new features as it comes in. Is it me or does a lot of the new features, especially the UI features seem completely unnecessary? I've only used app-tabs maybe once and Panorama twice just to see what they do, and after that, I completely disregarded them. I haven't used Sync at all. Is this experience common with other Firefox power users? Or am I just being a bit of a Luddite in not using them?

      Panorama is utterly useless in its current form and (a worse sin) is the source of many of the bugs delaying FF4.0. It should have gotten the chop. Perhaps if groups were remembered or something it might have some purpose. Perhaps if the "Group your tabs" was some kind of funky springloaded popup making it natural and easy to flip between groups or arrange them. But expecting people to arrange groups of tabs and see that all disappear when the browser closes is just a waste of time.

      App tabs are useful fo

    • As soon as I started using FF4 at the last beta (12), I started using all of those features. I keep GMail and Google Calendar in app-tabs, I love sync because I have Firefox instances in many VMs and on many machines, and the Panorama tool (which I thought would be gimmicky before I actually tried it) turns out to be very useful. I am happy with such "Feature Bloat" - what the hell to I have 4 gigs of RAM for anyways?

    • Sync's fantastic. I'm using the addon on 3.x, and it has been the answer to my prayers. (Once I disabled history sharing on my home desktop, ahem.) Otherwise I dunno, I'm not on the 4 branch.

  • Tabs! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bulletman ( 254401 )
    Please let new tabs open alongside the current tab! With a bunch of tabs, it makes navigation between the parent and child tab so much easier.
  • It's been a while since I've used Firefox (I believe I stopped using it just as version 3 was either being finish or just released-- switched to Opera and then Opera/Chrome).

    I've gotta say, the RC isn't bad. I hate that they've completely gone the Chrome route with the UI, though (although Opera did about the same thing). If some of my plugins (Logmein in particular) worked on it, I'd probably even keep using it (as it is, Logmein only works well with Internet Explorer and stable builds of FF).

  • by QCompson ( 675963 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @09:53AM (#35442652)
    It's probably due to the over-saturated coverage on slashdot, but I feel like FF4 has almost been released for the past year now.
    • by jfengel ( 409917 )

      Yeah, my first thought was "1? I thought they were up to 10."

      Then, oh, right, we've moved from beta to RC. For pete's sake, I'm going to wait for the actual release because the existing browser works well enough and I don't want to be a bug-tester. Do I have to hear about each and every point-point-point release?

      • This quite possibly is the final release. When Mozilla puts out a release candidate, if no major problems are found, it becomes the release version without any changes.
    • To be fair, I feel that way as well, probably because I haven't had any stability problems worth noting with the betas.

  • The sync plug-in for FF 3.6* makes a mess of my bookmarks. I use several computers at home and at work. Screwing up my data is NOT an option.

    Can anyone report whether the bookmark sync is robust in the 4 RC? I like the idea of the feature, but Xmarks does it better.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by greeze ( 985712 )

      No, it's crap. I love Firefox 4, but bookmark sync is pretty friggin' awful. I've lost entire folders full of bookmarks, which wouldn't be a problem if there was a way to roll back to previous versions. There isn't. Once they're gone, they're gone. Luckily I still had my Foxmarks account and was able to bring back most of what I'd lost. Until there's a way to view your sync'd data in a secure online account, and to roll back to previous versions, I suggest you stay far far away from Firefox Sync if yo

    • By now I am completely happy with it. Running nightlies and playing with Labs projects for the past few years I got burned quite a few times when the developers changed vital parts of the sync protocol or the way encryption is handled, but since the last big change a while ago when they stabilised the feature for the last betas I did not experience any issues. Syncing between four installations on two dual-boot machines (each Windows and Ubuntu) works like a charm.
    • I have been quite pleased with it, but I keep all my bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar. The first time I synced my home desktop with my work machine it made a little mess of the ordering, but I put everything back in place and it's been fine ever since.

  • by psm321 ( 450181 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @10:23AM (#35442996) Journal

    I'd use Chrome.

    • You can move tabs back on the bottom, restore the bookmarks bar, and change the Firefox button back to the menu bar. You can restore the statusbar with Status 4 Evar [mozilla.org], and you can move and add any buttons you want with a simple right-click. All of these are very trivial to do, and if you don't like customizing your browser there's always Seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org], which is pretty much just Firefox without the shiny-ness and a more classic UI.

      • by psm321 ( 450181 )

        Wait, the status bar is seriously gone from FF4? (I hadn't investigated or used it yet) How do they expect people to avoid phishing/suspect links if there's no simple way to tell where a link leads? Or is there a different place in the UI for it now?

  • Mozilla has now released Firefox 4 RC1. For most beta participants the update should be automatic, but for those holding out until it gets closer to feature freeze

    lolwtfbbq?

    Software isn't fucking BETA until it's feature complete.

    Mozilla is adding features to release candidates??

    Boy, that sure sounds like some real "innovation" right there...

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