Mozilla spills plan for, yes, Firefox 4

Mozilla has confirmed that the next major upgrade to its open source browser will be known as Firefox 4.0. The organization's current roadmap has version 4.0 arriving in November 2010, with the first beta hitting in June. Previously, developers had planned to follow Firefox 3.6, the last major release, with Firefox 3.7 around …

[Alastair 7]

Erm

"We were inspired by video games of our youth"

Seems a little more likely you were inspired by Firebug, no?

[Teoh Han Hui]

Firebug

I thought they've been busy removing developer functionality from within Firefox, and the reason they quote most of the time is the availability of developer tools such as Firebug. Why are they trying to reinvent the wheel now?

[Robert Heffernan]

Quake console, ABOUT TIME!

So FINALLY we'll be able to truly be able to deal with those evil worms embedded in websites...

drop the console down,

"Impulse 9"

"Impulse 255"

Go to town on those bad boys with quad damage and the nailgun!

[Steven Raith]

Mmm, impulse 255

Although having been playing eDuke32 recently [the open sourced, updated Duke Nukem 3D engine] I'm quite a fan of 'god' and 'give all'.

I wonder if 'give pr0n' will work?

On a more realistic and serious point, an easy way of making FF (and it's cache) run entirely in RAM would be be nice - the SSD on my old Acer Aspire One utterly hates writing to disk, and it causes constant freezes that last for up to 30 seconds. Running entirely in RAM would solve this problem at a stroke, and hopefully mean that I can watch Youtube videos without it hanging every ten seconds....

Steven R

[Anonymous Coward]

Title Required

The amount of RAM it uses at times you would think it IS running in memory only!

[LaeMing]

Quake terminals - yay

I like the slide-out terminal concept. I use the YaKuake termianl on my linux box and love it. Love things that slide out when you need them and disapear when you don't.

[Big-nosed Pengie]

FIREFOX IS TEH SUXORZ!

As any fule kno, Chrome loads pages one poofteenth of a second faster!

[Tom 64]

64-bit?

Wonder why they feel the need to port to 64 bit?

I guess it's so FF can gobble even more of my memory! I once caught it eating 1.5Gb on my dev rig!

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed

So it can get at the memory it requires quicker.

IE8 is installed in both 64 bit and 32 bit versions - 32 bit in case you want to use 32 bit plugins (e.g. Flash is still, several years on, awaiting a Windows 64 bit release).

Memory is one of the cheapest ways of getting a performance increase.

[Skrrp]

</title>

"Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,"

LittleFox FTW. I first got it for the small screen on the Netbook, it's on all my installs now. Clean and simple.

[The Original Ash]

My interface is smaller

... and it comes included with every browser out there. It's called F11. If you're irritated by not having the page controls, install an addon with gesture support.

I want my buttons easy to click, and easy to hide. We have that right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see

That all sounds splendid. Looking forward to the OOPP stuff in the release builds in the short term. Nice to hear that they're not resting on their laurels, though, and are working to streamline things, rather than just throw clutter at it.

[Robin]

It's Your Letters

> which offers so-called "out of process plug-ins," or OOPP

Do we really have to do this with every single technical term? It doesn't help with our collective separation from real people when we talk in a stream of abbreviations!

[SilverWave]

Yes

Just Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

@Robin

It's not a real technical term until it has been abbreviated! - And everybody knows that talking in abbreviations makes you sound smarter, which makes people like you! (lol!)

Seriously though, abbreviations like that are for writing, not talking. You only say well known abbreviations, like SQL or HTML. You *read* OOPP as "out of process plug-in", not "OOPP".

[TeeCee]

Quake console?

It's a hard life. You work your socks off securing your site, erecting little walls all over the place in software to ensure that nobody gets at your sensitive data.

Then some arsehat turns clipping off........

[JBH]

And..?

As someone who has just switched to Google Chrome, I could not give a monkey's. FireFox used to show so much promise. It was fast, versatile, and it beat IE into the floor. What the hell happened? These days I find it takes an age to start, it's unstable and compared to Chrome it just feels bloated and sluggish. This news leaves me thinking "meh..."

/desperately need an 'I bum Google' icon! ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm its google

FF is pretty slow to startup but once its open I dont close it for weeks at a time, using XMarks to sync tabs,pwds and favourites between PCs.

Thought about Chrome but its Google and I just dont trust them so thats never going to be installed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't trust Google either...

So you should look at Iron.....

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

[The Original Ash]

Did you visit their webpage?

Did you notice the giant popup on every single page you visit at that site? Usually I get car insurance.

There's a chat log posted somewhere when the "developer" of Iron (the guy who compiled the source of Chromium and posted it as a browser) admits that Iron is just a hook to get people to visit his ad-laden website, and pretty much all he does is turn off options which are on by default in Chrome, but still possible for the end user to disable.

[blackworx]

Re: And..?

The only time my machine ever caught something seriously nasty - a drive-by download with a keylogger payload - I was using Chrome. Granted I may have been asking for it by *cough* "looking at" porn *cough* at the time, but that's beside the point -- the nastyware managed to go about its business in complete silence despite various up-to-date process watchers, antivir etc. being active on the machine. I only spotted it because some prolonged drive activity made me suspicious enough to take a look. For a browser whose major selling points supposedly include beefed up security, sandboxing etc., this is a massive fail. For that reason alone I won't go near it, no matter how fast it is. Same reason I won't go near IE if I can help it (it's reserved for that small and dwindling number of pig-headed sites that still seem to insist on it).

I'm not saying any other browser is inherently more or less secure than Chrome, but one that provides an easy interface to dis/allow cookies, scripts, Flash etc. on a site-by-site basis will get my vote every time no matter how much of a memory hog or how imperceptibly slower it is at rendering pages than Chrome. Network factors have a more immediate and greater effect over how fast web pages appear than my browser *ever* will. Stability - or lack of it - has never been a problem for me. Taking an age to start can be a pain when you're in a rush, but it's not a deal-killer (certainly not in the way picking up silent drive-by downloads is) and they're changing that aspect of Firefox anyway.

Nah, I'm sticking with the Foxy one for now. To me, Chrome is lots of good day-to-day interface ideas with privacy and security taking a back seat. After all, why would Google want to let you stop them feeding you advertising cookies with a single mouse click?

[Tom Maddox]

Glad you like Chrome

Too bad it doesn't do all the things I need it to. One question: if you don't care about Firefox, why even read an article about it, much less take the time to comment?

[JBH]

Because...

Although I've lost my personal interest in FireFox, it would be foolish to deny that it's still a very important browser with a massive user base. Also, working in the I.T. industry, it would be foolish to not keep up with current developments.

Also, there is still a part of me that admires FireFox and wants to see it do well. I had hoped that v4 would bring some exciting changes under the bonnet, but so far the news has been quite uninspiring.

Use Chrome, use FireFox, hell you can even use IE as long as you play it safe, it's really not that important. Just because I favour one particular browser at the moment, doesn't mean I shouldn't be keeping an eye on the others.

Digging oneself into a particular position leads to fanboy-ism, and that's no way to go through life son! ;)

[Jamie Kitson]

Version

I'm already on 3.6.5pre, does that now translate to version 4?

[Boris the Cockroach]

But

I bet flash will still cause 1/2 of all FF problems

[Simon B]

Replace home button with home tab ... wtf?!

This will replace the existing "home" button. "Always locked to the left of your tab strip, this will provide the same interaction that your home button does, but it will be much more useful, always easy to reach."

Yeah, cus the home BUTTON is never easy to reach sitting in 1 place and in full view at all items - just like this "new" TAB that will, errr, sit in 1 place and in full view at all items.

Face it, all you've done is MOVE the home button, only now it resembles a tab ffs.

[Anonymous Coward]

as has been said before....

... they need to sort the memory usage out.

FF currently using 550mb with only this page open (I admit its being running all day).

[mittfh]

550MB?

With 8 tabs open with a variety of content, my copy of FirefoxPortable (3.6.3) is running at 185MB. Close a few and go down to 3 tabs, and it's 174MB. And a fair amount of that is probably due to running oodles of extensions e.g. LastPass, XMarks, ForecastBar, InfoRSS, Echofon, Greasemonkey, Stylish, TabMixPlus, AIOS, AdBlockPlus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your uptime must be...

About 15 minutes

[Mage]

550Mbyte?

With this page and 2 others on 1600x1200 screen I'm using 114Mbyte on FF 3.6

[Anonymous Coward]

And your uptime must be...

About 5 minutes.

[thenim]

It's buggy, it's bloated and..

Wait, normally I'd use that to describe IE, but I can't believe I'm using it for FF... used to be so good, now I just use Opera, won't touch Chrome- it's from the company "that does no evil" meh...

I just want something simple, I don't want plugins (none of them are useful - sorry, worst of all the Adobe ones [while I'm ranting, I can't believe how crappy Acro reader is on Linux, if viewing pdf inside FF, kills a CPU...]) I want something that just renders HTML/CSS well and supports javascript... couldn't give a rat's arse about flash/silverlight etc.etc. For the moment Opera fits that bill, till they screw it up.. oh well, back to lynx I guess...

[Steven Knox]

Corollary

"Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem," Beltzner said.

And the less the user can actually DO with it.

[Chris Hainey]

so...

... will this fix the memory hogging issues of 3.6.3?

[SilverWave]

If it crashes that's you not FF

Really

It just doesn't crash and I'm using the daily for ubuntu Lucid.

and lots of stuff... 362MB 31 tabs. chromium 797MB, 2 tabs.

Enabled Extensions: [34]

* Adblock Plus 1.2

* Back to Top 5.3.2

* BarTab 1.5.1

* Boox 2.6beta1

* Download Statusbar 0.9.6.8

* DownThemAll! 1.1.9

* Fission 1.0.9

* Gmail Notifier 0.6.4.1

* Greasemonkey 0.8.20100408.6

* Hide Caption 0.7.6.1

* Image Zoom 0.4.4

* Informational Tab 0.3.2010032901

* Linkification 1.3.8

* Locationbar² 1.0.5

* Make Link 9.11

* Menu Editor 1.2.6

* MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.4

* NewTabURL 2.2.0

* Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.3

* NoSquint 2.0.3

* OptimizeGoogle 0.78

* Places’ Full Titles 3

* Platypus 0.81

* Pronounce 1.4

* Reliby 1.5.0

* repagination 2006.4.5.1

* RequestPolicy 0.5.13

* Shelve 1.22

* SQLite Manager 0.5.15

* Stay-Open Menu 1.5.3

* Tab Counter 1.8.4

* Taboo 0.6.1

* Toolbar Buttons 0.6.0.8

* Tree Style Tab 0.10.2010040201

[Mart 2]

Instead of a 64-bit version

How about embracing the corporate environment and providing tools for corporate deployment, an MSI and ADM file would be way awesomer than a 64-bit version!