Mozilla delays Firefox 4 until 'early 2011' Mozilla has pushed back the planned release of Firefox to sometime in "early 2011." Previously, the open source outfit had said its latest desktop browser would be officially released next month. "As discussed in today’s Firefox delivery meeting, release candidate builds are now scheduled to ship in early 2011, with the final …
Firefox 4 is so far pretty outstanding, I usually make the switch from current to the next version when it hits the RC stage. (to use as my main browser)
There are still little niggles, like a webpage which hits the cpu hard with some bad js slows/freezes up the UI so closing the tab is a pain (a problem Chrome does not suffer from).
Hopefully when they finally get Electrolysis up and running everything will be hunky dory in that regard.
Am I the only one that greets browser upgrades with as much enthusiasm as most receive a new Windows OS?
I am plainly unique in not needing animated fairies gambolling in high-res along my themed toolbars. Neither do I run weather prediction models coded in JavaScript.
I stick with Firefox for the plugins. It's done pretty much everything I want fine since early 2.n
Paris - because she upgrades boyfriends at roughly the same frequency. Each time they're always bigger and sometimes dumber. Otherwise you can't tell the bloody difference.
Largely it is internal optimizations and ability to handle new HTML and other standards, stuff consumers browsing never notice (other than, "gee its slow"), but that is important for web developers.
I agree the fancy themes were a bit of wasted effort or most users. Needless code that they now need to maintain.
I've been using Fx 4b6 for a month and a bit now. I'm not impressed. At the same time I installed it, I also installed Opera 10.70 beta, IE9 beta, and the then beta chrome7.
IE9 works great, much better than Fx4. Opera and chrome are just small improvements of what already exists. Firefox is being left behind, badly.
Beta 6 is rather "meh" however out of curiosity I've been using the nightlies and just a week after that beta there was a significant improvement in speed and the interface looks MUCH better and works in a much slicker manner.
It doesn't have the same incredible speed as IE9 yet however its far faster than B6.
Hopefully these next few months will be spent on performance issues as that seems the most major issue on the nightlies.
Paris, because performance is key to her success too.
I am quite satisfied with the current version of FF. I have always like Firefox for the flexibility and control it gives me. I have always disliked IE it's still a clunky browser after all these years. Occasionally I will use Chrome. But recently I discovered that Chrome will not allow you make the browser show the fonts that you choose.
IE may be great and Windows 7 might be really good too. I don't know nor do I care. Microsoft has been paid handsomely for IE and Windows and have for years provided products that were barely functional and insecure. Others, many others, have done better for little or no pay but the big money has always been able suppress the competition. Oh, the times they are a changin'.
Better a little late than horribly buggy. After a year, people will forget your release was a few months late. They never forget if it was a disaster.
Of course the best strategy is to tell the outside world about a 12 month project is to tell the world it is a 14 month project, so you can slip 2 months with nobody knowing. And if you're on time by the real schedule, people are pleasantly surprised.
But that sort of expectations management can't be done with open source, since the outside world knows what the inside world knows.
@Cucumber C Face -- no I don't get too excited over browser updates either. However, although I don't run huge javascript stuff, I do appreciate the speedups. My Mini 10, Updating from Firefox 3.0 to 3.6 has increased my battery life by something like 30 minutes. I have not had any performance problems with my Mini* , but the Javascript speedups mean the CPU now almost always stays clocked down to 800mhz, whereas with 3.0 it'd frequently jump to 1.33ghz.
*Those claming the Atom CPU is not fast enough made the mistake of ordering the Mini with Windows. The Atom CPU does not have instruction reordering, so it runs code very poorly that is not built for the Atom... Ubuntu netbook remix is specifically built for the Atom CPU so it's quite fast on it. Although I did almost immediately turn off the special interface in favor of plain ol' gnome.
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