Mozilla to unload Firefox 4 spit and polish beta

Firefox is due to release an eighth Firefox 4 beta. Not to be confused with a fourth Firefox 8 beta. The latest test version of Firefox 4 – due for an official debut next year – was scheduled to go live on Tuesday. Mozilla hasn't added any new tools, but according to the release notes, the open sourcers have polished a few …

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, but...

is there a way to get the status bar back, reclaim the URL bar for URLs and not links, or fix the performance that steadily gets worse every release? (or reduce the ever-growing number of addons needed to make it usable and undo mozilla's latest gimmick?)

I thought not...

[Simon2]

Yes there is

i am running FF4 and when i updated to b7 i found that the status bar had disapeared.

There is an add-on called Status-4-Evar that brings it back (and more): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/

[DrXym]

Shouldn't need to be an add-on

I don't understand why Firefox ditched the function in the first place. By all means encourage people to use status in the address bar, but to remove it completely is annoying. The status bar conveyed a lot of information which is readily useful any more.

BTW, the status bar lives on as the add ons bar but there is no status widget to customize it with. It would be incredibly trivial to implement such a widget and it should ship with Firefox, not be an add-on.

[Thomas Burnham]

Ehh?

You can add it back, with...wait for it... AN ADDON! It's called "Status-4-Evar" iirc.

Steve Jobs, cause There's an Addon for That ©

[Jimbo in Thailand]

Re: Ehh?

Thomas, you poor iMbecilic iTard! Exactly what do you think Steve "The Son of Satan" Jobs has to do with Firefox add-ons other than trying to block them from you iDiotic iFanbois???!!!

Now be a good lad and go have a nice tall glass of Kool-Aid. You can even put it on my tab.

...now which pocket did I leave my airline ticket & Repo Men guide in? I've got to go repossess a kidney!

[Anonymous Coward]

Status bars

I'm not a fan of having a status bar, I usually turn it off in every browser I use but if you want a status bar without an add-on Opera 11 was released last week and performs very nicely. Even IE9 beta performs pretty well although I can't stand the UI. Who decided that putting the address bar and tabs all on one toolbar was a good idea???

[Anonymous Coward]

some people just can't be pleased...

After so much bitching on how firefox had become bloated, they decide to trim it, keeping the functionality using free add-ons. And now? they get bitched about that too...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's getting to the point...

...where, to get what people want from Firefox, you'd just download a null program and then use addons to construct your browser. Mozilla are well down the path trodden by the likes of Adobe and Nero in taking what was essentially a good product and burying it under a ton of useless and unwanted bloat.

Time to stop, go back to the drawing board and come up with something lean and mean.

[Mike Kamermans]

start from scratch?

They called it Chrome. Don't worry though, it's going down exactly the same path.

[Dan 55]

The button's still not been updated, but...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/4.0b8/

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can download it via http....

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-4.0b8&os=win&lang=en-GB

Seemed to work for me.

[Anonymous Hero]

@But you can download it via http....

That worked for me too.

Maybe they're beefing up their content distribution network before switching.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fonts over-anti-aliased

Is it me or are web pages almost impossible to read with this beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's you

See what Paris is wearing, try those.

[viet 1]

windows related problem

I've seen this reported elsewhere. FF on windows uses hardware rendering for fonts. You can revert to software rendering for the usual look, or tweak windows itself to render fonts to your convenience.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 11 FINAL

Still no news story about that, yet Firefox gets a new news item about every friggin code check-in.

You need to listen to yourselves. Another day, another EPIC EL-REG FAIL.

[Tony Green]

Maybe because hardly anybody uses Opera?

From my (admittedly probably unrepresentative) site logs, 20% of visitors use Firefox, 51% use IE, 16% use Safari, but a mere ONE PERCENT use Opera.

So maybe Opera is actually getting the attention it warrants.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

Those looks like fairly normal figures. My site's statistics, arguably based on more knowledgeable people than the average luser, are 45% firefox, 20% IE, 20% chrome, 9% safari and 4% opera. Opera gets about as much coverage as actual use, as it should do.

[viet 1]

Can we quit bitching for a second ?

I tried ff4 ß7 & 8 on linux. Both work as well or faster than ff3.6 on the same machine. WebGL is very impressive, but isn't enabled by default ; it's just a flip of a switch away, though (try the google chrome webgl demos, I really liked http://www.ninepointfive.org/ ).

I don't feel I've lost any function in the switch. It's stable, and fast considering the scope of this software. I've been using chrome, safari and IE recently too, and ff4 is at least on par with them when not outright better.

Extensions are a chance we'd be fool to object to.

All in all, thumb up, and I look forward for the final release.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh ... and the missing FF4 statusbar ...

WHY? Its a daft decision.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to agree ...

Why no love for Opera 11? I'm running it on Linux and OS X and its a very good and capable browser with many good features. I'm not saying it hasn't a few annoying quirks, but these tend to be less annoying than ff or ie (by several orders of magnitude).

Its nicely low-key, doesn't get in the way and I love the stackable tabs feature. Very nice indeed.

Never got any coverage here or anywhere else that I saw.

A real shame.

[Steven 33]

I for one...

would like to keep it that way, lean and low key. I am perfectly happy using it and find it suits my every need, and I like that it doesnt have many users as it means for a large part, the malware authors are not targeting it...

[blackworx]

UI

I really don't like the address-bar-for-every-tab fashion that all browsers seem to be falling victim to. To me it's illogical and counterintuitive. I blame Google. The barstewards.