Firefox 4 Released! 554
A great number of readers have written in to tell us that Mozilla has officially announced the final, official, Firefox 4.0. Congrats to all the developers who have code in the build. If you want some neat eye candy, you can watch a sweet visualization showing where the downloaders are.
Re:When is 3d support going into Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to something I think I read on Phoronix a couple weeks back, it support the binary Nvidia driver already. They say that trying acceleration with any other Linux driver crashes way too often to be shipped enabled.
You're waiting on the driver vendors to fix their shit, not Firefox.
Re:Do not want (Score:3, Insightful)
Privacy and avoiding data miner look like pretty good reasons for me.
Does it still have the AwfulBar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it still have the AwfulBar?
Not interested.
Re:Awsome! (Score:2, Insightful)
Check the timestamp of the newspost and the timestamp of the comment. It's another of Microsoft's poorly-planned astroturfing squad, with a paragraph of text including thinly-veiled praise of their Redmond masters ready to roll the very minute the newspost was made.
No, not "a few minutes afterward", the amount of time it would take to actually type all that. And not "a one-line response", the amount of text you'd expect to get out between noticing the post and responding. Numerous sentences of text, the same minute of the post. All this BEFORE the usual tool-assisted first post crowd comes in. It's a shill.
I've heard many times before that Microsoft itself is largely cloistered from the rest of the world, engineers, marketeers, and management alike. They actually DO think this is the best way to spread the gospel of Microsoft, and they actually DO think nobody will notice it.
Re:Awsome! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the download page, the new version includes "even more awesomeness". No word on whether or not the level of suck has decreased.
Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it still have the AwfulBar?
Not interested.
Do a quick comparison between FF's location bar and Chrome's. Try to get to multiple book marked URLs that are on the same domain. What I find is that FF has a very rich and useful built in search/regex matching function in it's location bar, where as chrome has a very basic auto-complete.
I can easily type in multiple partial words into the location bar, (even just a couple letters) and easily find bookmarks that I use for work. With Chrome I have to type out the full url, or if a partial match is found, I have to still edit the URL to get where I want to go.
It also _learns_ and remembers the most hit URLs for partial words.
It seems Google doesn't want you searching your bookmarks at all, especially not from your browser locally. It seems like it wants to make you use their online services for something this basic.
-anon
Re:Awsome! (Score:2, Insightful)
Flamebait? Okay, let's try this exercise: I'm going to take his post and change the names of those involved:
Microsoft is doing good job improving Internet Explorer. They hunted down and patched thousands of bugs from Internet Explorer 8. Not only that, they took the succesful look that Opera has and made Internet Explorer look as good as Opera. I wish they would make the interface a little bit snappier, but it's ok! They're also the only browser with Chrome to fight bad the big guys and doesn't support the evil H.264 - someones have to fight for our rights! And I hope Microsoft makes the next version as secure as Firefox with its sandboxing and all the extra security features Mozilla has build on FireFox.
Please explain to me how this post wouldnt' be considered paid-for-and-bought.
Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to search my bookmarks through my url bar. I already have my bookmarks sorted by category.
Seriously, more and more apps are enabling users to be absolute slobs with their data and try to "help." Those of us who already organized our data get these unhelpful, resource hogging "features" that we can't disable.
My bookmarks/files/etc are perfectly organized already! I don't need Firefox/iTunes/etc reorganizing my stuff for me, or helping me to find it!
Re:Awsome! (Score:5, Insightful)
And I hope Mozilla makes the next version as secure as IE9 with its sandboxing and all the extra security features Microsoft has build on Windows 7.
See divxo et al for more info. Still, it's good that the shills are learning. They are at least trying to emulate what they perceive to be a typical slashdotter's speech. Not that it's working just yet, but they are making some efforts. There are a lot of inconsistencies that they must iron out, though, so they should lurk moar. That's mostly for 4chan, not /., if you're taking notes (which I recommend you do).
also the only browser with Chrome to fight bad the big guys and doesn't support the evil H.264 - someones have to fight for our rights!
Whle there are some weird people out there, most people who are averse to corporations and patents refrain from phrasing their opinions as if they were five-year-olds. "Evil H.264" just don't cut it as believable material. But it's ok, at least it's an effort. I must point out, though, that if you're against the "big guys", you probably won't gratuitously draw attention to their product being so superior.
the succesful look that Opera has and made Firefox look as good as Opera
This was an understandable mistake. But most of us, if we really care enough to keep voicing our opinions about browsers, will pick one or two. I'm yet to see someone describing with such (poorly worded) passion all browsers. If Chrome, Opera, Firefox and IE9 are all so cool and good, I'd expect a "meh, all browsers are pretty competent nowadays", not "hey, Firefox is great, it's now as great as Opera is great, and Google rules because it defies "bad the big guys" and IE9 is so secure WOW so glad to b here guys!". To get a little more believable, how about choosing one browser to focus on as a favorite? Tell us why you use it etc. Make up some stories. It's cool, a lot of people here are doing it right now. Some are even becoming lawyers or war veterans, so retroactively using a software for a couple of days seems comparatively easy. I really wish for the shills to get better. They can still defend a product to their employer's heart's content, but doing so believably would be better for al of us. Not that quality is always necessary to blend in, since the standards aren't that high, but avoiding glaring oversights is, otherwise they'll only blend in with the trolls.
Re:Awsome! (Score:2, Insightful)
You're stupid.
Re:Awsome! (Score:2, Insightful)
I contribute to software development only if it is FLOSS [...] I don't miss Flash: all you get through proprietary tech is [...] idiotic games that belong back in early 1990-ies.
What well-known FLOSS games can you think of that aren't stuck in the Super NES era of game design? Can you think of any that were FLOSS from day one, or whose data files are also free, or both?
All good except DirectWrite font rendering. (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first fired it up, my first thought was: "Yuk, What happened to the fonts?"
Some searching revealed this is the MS Win7 DirectWrite Font rendering(IE 9 does the same thing).
Disable HW acceleration and all is well with my fonts.
Why does DirectWrite font rendering look so awful? Do other people actually prefer this (fonts are thicker and closer to together).
Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? (Score:2, Insightful)
Those of us who already organized our data get these unhelpful, resource hogging "features" that we can't disable.
Except, of course, for the fact that you can disable the Awesome Bar. Options -> Privacy -> Locations Bar -> "When using the location bar suggest": Options are History, Bookmarks, Bookmarks and History, and Nothing. Personally, I hate getting bombarded with every site that I've visited in the past 6 months when I type something into the location bar, so I have mine set to bookmarks only. But hey, you obviously disagree with that sentiment, so you could set it to just history or nothing if you prefer.
Re:How to restore the older tabs look: (Score:4, Insightful)
This was the first thing I did. If I want to use Chrome, I'll use Chrome.
Change for change's sake.
Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? (Score:4, Insightful)
Disabling the awesome bar solves part of the problem. However, it doesn't restore the functionality the location bar had before it was replaced by the awesome bar.
It's not just the the awesome sucks. It's that mozilla removed something that worked and replaced it with something that doesn't. Turning off the part that doesn't work is insufficient to solve the problem.
Re:How to restore the older tabs look: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why people don't like their tabs on top. I like it, and there's quite a few good reasons [mozilla.com] for them to be on top (such as how the buttons like back and forward only modify what's on the current tab, making the buttons appear to be directly connected to the tab). The only reason I can think of off the top of my head for keeping the tabs on the bottom is just a resistance to change or not being used to the new behavior, which I completely understand. Insisting that it's "where they belong", though, is just nonsense.