Firefox 6 Ships Next Week, 8 Blocks Sneaky Add-Ons 247
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Soulskill
from the seven-due-the-week-after dept.
from the seven-due-the-week-after dept.
CWmike writes "Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website. 'On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday,' the notes stated. Firefox 6 includes several noticeable changes, including highlighting domain names in the address bar — both Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 do something similar by boldfacing domain names — and reducing startup time when users rely on Panorama, the browser's multi-tab organizer. Meanwhile, Mozilla said this week that starting with Firefox 8, Mozilla will automatically block browser add-ons until users approve them, which should put an end to sneaky installs."
Something to watch out for (new submenu) (Score:4, Informative)
In case you missed it, Web Console in FF5+ is like the console in Firebug when you have it set to enter JS commands at the bottom of the pane. But the difference is, Web Console is always available. It's not a plug-in like Firebug. So it's something you can count on, even if you upgrade and Firebug breaks in the new version.
Re:Ability to install out-of-date addons (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bugs, memory leaks, and poor performance. (Score:2, Informative)
I can answer that. Go to video sites that are NOT Youtube, like most of the 'Ow my balls!" kind of dumb vid sites? watch FF suck down memory like a wino sucking down MD 20/20. The Chormium based and IE seem to give mem back when you close tabs, FF? Not so much.
I have also seen cases where I had left FF running and went off to do something else and forgot about it and several hours later come back and memory had JUMPED a good 30-40%! Again it seems to be tied to whether or not you had played any videos that day.
This is why after years of having FF in my standard customer build I have replaced it with Comodo Dragon [comodo.com] which IMHO has some nice extra features as far as security and no calling home to Google so it is the best Chromium based for me and my customers. I've always loved the FF UI but IMHO after the 3.6.xx branch FF has just gone to shit. Its memory usage is nuts, it spikes the living hell out of CPUs, especially if the tab you are launching contains video, its just a mess. I have to support everything from netbooks and late P4 office machines to multicore and I need something that will give a consistent experience. Dragon does, FF don't.
Personally I think it is the Gecko engine. I just don't think it has been able to take all the extra crap they have bolted on like plugin separation. Where FF once was a nice lean solid browser ever since Chromium came out it has been "Me too!" to the 50th power instead of just making FF the best FF it can be and I think it shows. I haven't seen memory leakage this bad since the 2.x.x branch. I hope they fix it so I can have another browser in the toolbox but right now the responsiveness and resource usage just isn't there. When it takes a good 25+ seconds to launch FF on a 2.8GHz quad with 8Gb of RAM? That is fucked up. The Dragon takes less than 5 seconds from click to typing.
Re:I'll rather wait for FF7 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, shit, because I still have a PowerPC Mac on my desk. It's stuck with Firefox 3.6 because they dropped PowerPC support in Firefox 4.
Firefox is being kept alive on PowerPC:
http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/ [google.com]
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
unHappy FF user here (Score:5, Informative)
The only downside is extensions
I've been loving Firefox for years, but this fast release schedule is driving me nuts. Every time a new "major" version comes out now, at least one or two of my extensions break. The first one to go (on FF4) was Ubiquity, which still isn't fixed, and the stupid thing about that is Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs extension. It's pretty sad when their own damn extensions can't even keep up, let alone 3rd party stuff.
So, back to your point about extensions being the only downside, honestly, do we use Firefox for any other reason? I could have ditched FF for Chrome or even IE9 (shudder) but it's the extensions that make Firefox so awesome, and that's what's suffering the most with this bullshit release schedule.
Re:Another upgrade? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Happy FF8 user here (Score:4, Informative)
Haha, so it seems like they decided to get rid of the initial "http://" in displayed urls as well as the trailing / on root urls. That is, if you're on the regular Slashdot home page, the full string displayed in the url bar is just slashdot.org. Copy-and-paste it somewhere and you still get http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org], though. Other protocols (including https) still include the protocol part.
Here's the associated ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665580 [mozilla.org]
There will be many flame wars over this when Firefox 8 is more widely distributed.