Firefox 4.0 developers granted year of living dangerously Mozilla won't release the next significant upgrade of Firefox until the final quarter of 2010. The open source browser maker said it expects to release Firefox 4.0 in October or November of next year. Of course before that versions 3.6 and 3.7 will be squirted out by the team, assuming that Mozilla doesn't hit similar …
Most ideas in software get spread around and shared, and/or are built on the ideas of others that came before, or combine many ideas from many existing sources sometimes in new and creative ways. This is what is called the human freedom to think and share, and also why we have copyright for software, as a means of expression. It is only proprietary software companies that try to exclusively control or patent other people's ideas that worry me, and there is only one organization that I know which both purposefully and maliciously chooses to do so by patenting other people's ideas. That to me is fraud. So I think the comparison offered by Mark is both irrelevant and incorrect.
You can still keep the old look and feel. For me FireFox is already 100% perfect. It does everything I need it to do and I never worry about crashes, reboots or anything else because all my tabs will still be there when I get back.
They have reached perfection for me so I hope the changes won't interfere too much with that.
What is this I keep hearing about firefox crashing? I run it on Linux, Vista, and SPARC/Solaris. I've only seen it crash on Solaris, which is fair enough given its version 2.0.0.x, with an NFS home directory and a multi user machine with limited resources. It will run happily for weeks/months at a time under linux with 20+ tabs open (1GB laptop).
Take a lesson from the WinTel camp. Nobody wants wiz-bang shit! They just want a fast, stable computer. Its a browser for christ sake. There is no way to improve the UI, except for maybe the aweful bookmark management. But there are plugins for that anyway.
Just cause you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should*.
400K? You, sir, are lucky
I find that firefox regularly uses up to 300MB of my RAM, and around 100% of my processor if it's having a bad day and/or I've forgotten to turn on NoScript to block those retarded flash adverts.
Then again I usually have 20 tabs open each doing something strenuous, so alot of that is probably justified.
so, yes, lightweight pls :)
Last week I had a play with chrome and it is so much faster than FF3.5.2 that I've switched.
Chrome is noticeably faster, everything works faster. I'll look at FF4, but I'll skip the next few point releases.
That said, I'm not that happy about adverts on the interweb again :(
It frequently crashes (Linux, OSX *and* Windows) it IS getting fearfully bloated and slow and it DOES leak memory (try watching how much of 4Gb it can gobble up before crashing when maximising the iPlayer window). Also, you DON'T always get back your previous session when it restarts.
It is getting rather too clever (or trying to) and badly needs to assess where it wants to go. Slavishly copying purely cosmetic features from other browsers is not, in my view, the right direction.
I remember v 0.9 and thought it brought fun back into browsing. Now I'm getting to dread using it. Still, I persevere and live in hope.
It's all ever so simple.
Those of you who don't like the feature changes in newer versions of FireGibbon but like the swiss cheese security holes being plugged are at complete liberty to maintain your own version of Firefox 1, 2 or 3 and just patch it whilst preserving the feature set and user interface.
That's what open source is all about, remember, so how come no one does it and everyone moans about what one company are doing as if they' either have to like it or lump it? That's the argument against closed source you usually hear wheeled out by the open source fanboys.
Attention FF developers:
1) STOP f*nnying about with the interface. It is good enough, we're all used to it, there is no need for this constant tweaking unless you have something REALLY special.
2) Make it damn well start up faster.
That is *all* you need to do. I for one am getting pissed off with this constant FOSS obsession with release X.Y.Z.micro.nano.pico. It's getting to the stage where every damn app on my PC bleats at me every couple of days to update, I can't fecking even keep up anymore. Security patches, yes. Major upgrades, yes. But until you have something that is *demonstrably* going to improve my user experience, how about just leaving me alone?
That goes for you boys at Adobe, OOo, Canonical, Sunoracle etc. too.
</rant>
I used to loath IE, but it's now pretty high on my list of favourite browsers considering how irritating Firefox has become in its goals to produce endless more good ideas that no one thought through.
IE was basic, too basic as it didn't even adhere to some pretty simple and widespread standards. That's all gone now and it's a delight to use. And that's coming from a guy who uses Safari on his Mac at home.
Firefox had so much promise, but like all spoilt children it has grown up to be arrogant and useless; and impossible to live with. I can't browse without endless security popups, which are due to very good reasons but can't be turned off. It's slow to start, fails to load the tabs I set in the options, fails to respond smoothly to almost all interactions and.... I have a fast machine with plenty of memory. And that's Windows. On the Mac it's even worse.
No support for standard controls in either OS due to skinning and plugins. They need to go back to scratchboard, remove all the stupid pretty features that bog it down and stick to what they first promised to deliver: a good, fast, reliable and secure browser. Not secure as in a chastity belt, secure as in secure software that keeps me aware of what's going on.
Whine, whine, whine.
Change frightens and confuses me. Change is therefore bad.
Whatever the status quo is, that's good.
If I initially learned how to use something sometime in the past, then that past state is "good," and all subsequent states are increasingly bad.
Thus, I consider NCSA Mosaic to be the best browser, and I shall use the nonsense word, "bloat," to refer to all browsers which came later.
In Windows XP SP3:
Install FF 3.5.x and also install the "IE Tab" addon at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=ie+tab&cat=all.
Then go to some site of your choice, maybe http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate/v6/default.aspx?ln=en-us. Without doing anything else, close FF by clicking the upper right corner red box "X" to close.
It doesn't have to be the Windows update site, but every time I invoke IE Tab, and then click the "X" FF 3.5.x crashes. Could be me, dunno, does it on four XP machines ... no matter.
3.5.2 which is frankly shit.
Crash after Crash, slows everything down, 100% CPU usage and even after you close it the damn thing sits in process until you manually end it.
A lot of website's get cranky with it, its like a very bad beta.
Roll it back to sub 3.0 when it did what was needed and didnt fall over like a drunk bird on a saturday night.
Paris, falls over legs akimbo without warning as well.
Firefox-Super (FFS), Support Acid 3, declarative SVG animation, bug fixes faster than IE, Easy management via windows policies. It'll have everything for everyone.
It runs blazingly fast, Super easy to manage and maintain, supports all web standards.
Then us poor webdevs will still be pulling our hair out cause our sites have to look like Troll Dung to cope with of the 25% on ie 6 and lower....
FFS give a webdev a break, not a breakdown.
Recover tabs? You mean when you close a tab and want it back?
Opera has this (it had it 3 years before Firefox got it). On the tab bar, at the far right.... Gives you a list of close tabs that you can reopen. Each one still had it's back/forward history, and even any form data you have filled in...
The address bar *should* be under the tabs, it doesn't make sense otherwise. The way it is at the moment (with the address bar at the top and tabs under) is saying "here's where you are, and in there are all these tabs". Having it tabs then address says "you're on this tab, and the page is at this address". Much better!
Paris for the whole on-top/underneath indecision.
Why are all the big software companies doing this?
"Right we're going to make version X faster and more stable, oh, and you know that menu bar that gives users easy access to all the features? - it's gotta go"
"But it's worked just fine for over a decade"
"You're not thinking outside of the box. Our users want blue sky cloud thinking to interconnect twitter new media solutions top down tier marketing, we are at the forefront of digitally applied gross learning pathways with retro futuristic portfolio planning potentials plus potent pivotal products ..."
Sometimes I am physically disgusted that these people actually get paid.
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