Firefox 9.0 Beta Available 291
An anonymous reader tips news that, right on schedule after Tuesday's Firefox 8.0 launch, Mozilla has rolled out the beta of Firefox 9.0. This update brings a significant boost to JavaScript performance, UI improvements for the OS X Lion version, and Do Not Track opt-out detection for developers. 9.0 beta also "supports chunking for XHR requests so websites can receive data that’s part of a large XHR download in progress. This helps developers make websites and Web apps faster, especially those that download large sets of data or via AJAX."
Please stop.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Releasing new versions of firefox and fix the version you have, I'd appreciate 5.1 greatly, I'd also appreciate my browser not freezing randomly at times for 30 second intervals on the most random of things. I like firefox and I know a lot about its structure, but I have chrome installed now because some stuff just won't work as I want it to in ff. Kind of feels like I threw my chips in and now the project is heading completely downhill, I don't like IE UI & I don't know much about chrome, but holy shit, I'm about done w ff. Anybody from mozilla read forums to get user feedback or anything? Guys?
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Lost track... (Score:1, Insightful)
Do Not Track = dumbest delusion since DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Why the hell would that not be hard-coded to "Hell no, do not ever track me!".
2. Why the hell would any of those soulless bastards who use tracking in the first place suddenly grow a conscience and care about that feature?
1. If you believe "Do Not Track" works, you also believe that clicking on "unsubscribe" links in mails as well as DRM works.
2. If you are a person who cares about offending and not ripping off people, why do you track them in sneaky crooked ways the first place?
Re:I do not know what to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
This has stopped being funny after FF5. It's the same comment over and over again, who mods this up?
And yet Chrome is all right by you people. Look next FF is getting silent updates. Get fucking over it.
Finally abandoned FF at v8 (Score:1, Insightful)
Auto-updated me to v8, browser started completely freezing and crashing after 60 seconds. Worthless... as much as I love FF and everything it stands for, I don't need a buggy POS that rolls out another poorly QA'd product every two weeks. Switched to chrome and sadly happy with the decision.
-rt
Let it die (Score:4, Insightful)
I was a FF user since it was called Phoenix, and then Firebird when it was a set of patches for Mozilla. I have been advocating its use since 2004 and switched many computers and friends over. It was a great browser at one time. Unfortunately, its time is coming to an end unless drastic things improve.
To me FF in the 2010s is more similiar to the IE 6 of the 2000s I ran away from. Its rapid release schedule increased the popularity of IE [statcounter.com]in the US from users and corporations not liking FF anymore. Chrome according to that site is about tied with FF worldwide and will soon overtake it for #2.
The saddest thing for me is not the current state of FF. It is the fact that I am using IE more and more and preferring IE 9 over FF. IE 10 will give FF a run for its money [blogspot.com] and even Chrome next March when it is released. It is complete opposite of 2005 now and it is amazing it happened in such a very short period of time.
Fix your bugs Mozilla and I may come back like I did with IE. Until then I recommend everyone use Chrome or IE. FF is just too unreliable.
Re:8 now 9....tomorrow will be 15 (Score:5, Insightful)
The "some reason" is that 1. it's preposterously rapid.
8 was out on Tuesday, now 9 beta is available, by next Tuesday 9 will be out and 10beta will be ready by next Friday.
And 2. that the whole number releases are NOT really new versions. Well, some of them are, but how do you know which ones?
I know the idiot developers at Mozilla think this is no big deal. One of them even said so on this site earlier this week. But it is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. It's breaks add-ons. People have better things to do that try to fix that every week. It also screws up sites that NEED older versions to work -- like banking sites. But if you stick with the old version it screws up sites like Gmail because they need the latest "version" or 3. It's a catch 22. There is now ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE WAY, NONE, of using Firefox throughout the majority of web that most regular people need to do. You absolutely HAVE to use more than one browser for your daily needs. This is worse utility than they had with 0.86. And the reason is simply VANITY and EGO.
It's fucked up. Totally fucked up. And the only reason Mozilla are doing this is because it makes them feel like their dicks are bigger than everyone else's.
Just like with Netscape, Mozilla is determined to bloat their browser into the ground. They are already bleeding users, just because of this numbering system. And they are too dumb, and too vain, to reverse the retarded decision.
But hey, let them learn the hard way, very soon they will be too unemployed to make such retarded decisions again.
Re:8 now 9....tomorrow will be 15 (Score:3, Insightful)
It pisses people off because Mozilla has inflated their versioning system. They are incrementing quickly not because they are integrating major, watershed features but because they want to pump up the version number quickly. This is because marketers believe consumers view version numbers as an indicator of a product's maturity. To such people, Chrome would seem to be way out in front. So they are forcing all of these reinstalls and obsoleting extensions over and over for little gain, all because their marketing folks think this will help with market share.
I think we've all been insulted.
Firefox to Chrome to Safari (Score:5, Insightful)
These version numbers are getting ridiculous. They'll be up to 2x.0 by next year at this rate. And every time they manage to break something.
I switched to Chrome a while ago, but now I'm using Safari because I like the OS X Lion integration that it seems only Apple is interested in or capable of providing. Native gestures (which FF now has, apparently), integrated dictionary lookup, autocorrect built into the spell checker. And it just feels faster, even when FF has no add-ons enabled.
If FF can do all that I'll switch back.
Re:Version changes are the most visible evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are whinging about:
1. They are rich... (I wish I was rich too, stop complaining and get to work, slacker)
2. Firefox crashes... (seems to be a problem with Windows XP... stop using crappy Windows XP)
3. HDMI cables??? (WTF??!?? HDMI cables???)
(My anecdotal experience... Firefox never crashes on my Mac... Chrome OTOH, crashes regularly. YMMV)
Re:Please stop.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not have bug fix patches for older releases? The problem isn't that these new releases are mostly just bug fixes, but that they're the ONLY release that's supported. FF8 is out now, which means no more patches to FF7. You are either forced to upgrade or you do without bug and security fixes. The reason Mozilla is getting a lot of pushback is because customers don't like being told what to do.
Shut Off Auto-Update!Re:Finally abandoned FF at v8 (Score:2, Insightful)
For the luff of ghod shut off auto-update, and when a new version comes out just download it and then run a dry-run test in a temporary fashion before committing to the next version. Oh and stop kvetching about having to abandon a product because your skills are sloppy.
Re:Version changes are the most visible evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation.
Question: Where does their money come from? Would you say they have a "reliable income stream"? If you would, you probably dont know very much about them at all, since 90% of their income comes from search engine deals with one or two companies.
No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html#feature-team [mozilla.org]
Thats the team. Anyone's guess how many people that is, and how many of them actually code, but I would wager far far more volunteers work on firefox than employees.
Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in 2008?
And seriously, im not sure where youre going with this. Is this some "fight the man" thing? You can always vote with your wallet, by not paying for their free browser, I guess.
Honestly, what are you complaining about? It cant even be considered your money in a "trickle down" sense-- its coming from third parties for setting a default search engine. If its such a big deal to you, use IE9 or Opera or Chrome or Safari. Switching isnt hard, really-- I promise.
One condition of instability: Windows XP 32-bit with Service Pack 3, for example, becomes unstable when Firefox has taken all the available memory, and is beginning to require the OS to use virtual memory. It seems a reasonable guess that Microsoft will be slow to fix Windows instabilities since poor experiences encourage people to buy new versions
Yea, Mozilla should totally get right on fixing a Windows problem. Or are you just going way off topic, or speculating wildly? How do you even know whether this is a Windows, Firefox, or third party issue?
2) Version 7.0.1 sometimes stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.
Give it some time to flush and close the sqlite database. It should leave memory after about 10 seconds, tops, unless your computer is really awful.
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
4) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite [evolt.org], before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".
And apparently you never read the replies from the devs starting around 3.0--
Fix your damn plugins, extension memory leaks arent Mozilla's responsibility
Seriously, I have oodles of computers that I use, and I simply dont see this issue. I have a large suspicion that these few complaints I constantly see on slashdot are from people who either use messed up extensions, are blaming mozilla for wonky plugins, or have hardware / OS issues outside of Mozilla's control. Scores of people try to track down these "memory issues", and the verdict time and again seems to be "it doesnt look substantially different than any other browser".
FWIW, one of my coworkers used to run Firefox 3.x on XP with about 9 instances going, with about 20 tabs each, for days on end. Must have been working for him, one would think, and I dont think he had more than 2gb ram (Im sure he had some serious paging going on).
Re:Please stop.... (Score:5, Insightful)
9.0? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do they add a minor version when they know they're never going to use them?
Re:Version changes are the most visible evidence. (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
Yet it happens. Adobe Flash under Firefox seems to be able to kill my Linux system.
I'm not saying that Flash is executing in kernel space, but it seems that if there is a bug in system services or kernel, Flash (and so Firefox) will find it. (see Murphy laws)