Firefox 4, A Day Later 435
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.
Re:App ecosystem! (Score:4, Informative)
The author appears to be a die-hard MS fan with a lot of his history invested in MS products so it is unsurprising that he would write a pro-IE article.
Ref:
Personal website "Microsoft Expertise" - http://www.edbott.com/weblog/
Profile on MS: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/meetexperts/bott.mspx
Re:Apples to Oranges? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Meanwhile, in ExtensionLand... (Score:5, Informative)
I just want to make sure ... firebug ... well-tested and confirmed working before I make the jump.
Don't know about "well-tested" (well tested like "a two year Debian release cycle" ?) but I can certainly confirm firebug is working or at least it hasn't failed yet.
Also working:
Adblock plus
flashblock
ghostery
noscript
xmarks
Not working:
Remove it permanently (I can survive without it, but its nice) .net framework assistant 1.2.1 (WTF is this anyway?)
Microsoft
Immediately upon installation:
Right click on that wee little down triangle in the address bar. Uncheck "Tabs on Top" then breathe a sigh of relief as your eyes stop bleeding. Then de-turd the toolbar by right click on the same triangle and select "Customize..." and then rip out the search bar (useless), the home button (so 1993), the stop button (again, so 1993), rearrange the refresh/reload button where god intended it to be, ditto the spinner. Basically just clean it up a bit. Should have come preconfigured this way.
I don't like the weird new forward / reverse buttons. I have muscle memory from FF3 to move back to the start of history in a tab, which no longer seems to work, epic UI fail to screw the user that way. That's the only UI problem I haven't been able to work around yet.
So with about five minutes of amount of work, upgrade results in only two dead (admittedly useless) addons, and one UI fail that'll only strike me about 50 times a day no big deal. I've seen worse dot-zero releases.
I have a clunky many years old desktop and on both FF3 and FF4 everything comes up in "blink of eye" speed, I don't even know how to test if its slower or faster because everywhere I go is faster than my visual cognition (and thats fast, I'm a very fast reader). Its hardly orders of magnitude different, anyway.
What Ed Bott doesn't understand is amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Google is able to turn out new browsers quickly because it uses WebKit to render its pages. MSIE 9 uses Trident (MS's own) and Firefox uses Gecko (Mozilla's own).
Microsoft did not update Trident "over night." It has been going on for a very long time.
For Ed to assert that Google and Microsoft took a similar route on anything is simply inaccurate.
All this nonsense about "faster browsers" is already out the window due to this movement to hardware acceleration. Now different browsers will perform differently based on the hardware present, the level of support for the hardware and more. Linux is still the red-headed stepchild where hardware support is concerned. This is especially the case where graphics drivers are concerned. Microsoft does not have to worry about this because it controls the platform it supports. Google and Mozilla and more write for more than Windows and operate against the APIs which are known and documented.
Despite all of Microsoft's tremendous resources and programming talent, they are still not producing a standards compliant browser on par with Chrome or Firefox. I can't believe it is due to a lack of talent or resources. It must be for some other reason and I suspect it has to do with backward compatibility and possibly even maintaining the appearance that "all other browsers are broken" as users seem to perceive.
Re:To play devils advocate (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. The performance difference for me is huge. Its so big, its instantly obvious from the second it starts, which even includes a much faster start for all my tabs. Its instantly snappy and I'm an extremely heavy tab user too. Flash sites are slightly more responsive and now I'm even running greasemonkey (didn't before) which should further slow things. And yet, things are definitely faster. I'm even observing a reduce memory footprint, which I didn't expect, of roughly 200M for the same tabs. I'm extremely impressed. Version 4.0, by far, exceeds my expectations.
As for plugins and add-ons, everything I use is already available for 4.0 so I'm pretty pleased. The only gotcha I've run into is the default linux release is 32-bit and you have to dig to find the 64-bit download. If any cares, you download the 64-bit linux release here. [mozilla.org]
Oh ya, am observing an extremely annoying issue with 4.0 and slashdot in that entry fields get pushed past the bottom of the screen when making posts, with the new slashdot interface abomination, truly a pain in the ass. Yet another reason to continue to use the old interface. Works great with the old interface. New interface is broken with 4.0.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:5, Informative)
Why is the non-profit Mozilla Corp not spending that money to hire developers to add new features to their browser?
Just look at their jobs page...