
Good news however, is that
there is a better alternative to Firefox 4 anyway.
www.opera.com
Mozilla is bracing itself for yet more beta releases and possibly another delay of its Firefox 4 browser. The open-source web tool outfit pushed out a 10th test build of Firefox 4 last week. It has now confirmed that two more betas will definitely follow before a Release Candidate version of the browser lands. "The current …
Is that why it makes El Reg's server barf with a 400 error when you try to load a comments page meaning you have to copy the url and pop across to the Web app and paste it there to be able to see it?
Thank heavens for Opera being as pedantic over standards as Opera commentards are pedantic in this forum. It all goes to improve the user experience...
As for Opera, at least FF4 displays the pages correctly, even if a handful of crap-code sites (yes, MS Hotmail) don't work 100%.
I think FF has a great model of heavily testing their releases and isn't willing to throw a beta/buggy build out in the wild posing as a release build. Too many software people do this just to make deadlines or even simply to make it to market before a competitor.
/mine's the one with a UML diagram in the pocket
"... new windows instead of tabs"
Yeah, I thought it was doing that from right-clicks; until I finally noticed that "Open Link in New Window" and "Open Link in New Tab" on the right-click menu have swapped around (c/w FF3). Still trying to educate myself to stop making a small down & right move with the mouse when right-clicking a link.
Guess it just goes to show how ingrained some habits become.... old dog / new tricks etc.
"Being able to browse the web with Firefox means relying on third parties to maintain compatible code all the time," wrote Henri Sivonen, who is an independent contractor consulting for the Mozilla Corporation.
You write your code to the standards, and then if a site it not work, it's becase the site is not written to the standards.
This is why I use Opera, it's strict adherence to web standards is very important to me. If only more people worked it out, that if everyone used web standards compliant browsers, lazy web coders would HAVE to write and test to the same standards.
It must burn you up inside that people to use other browsers. That's about the only reason I can see that you leap on these threads with your general ignorance. The irony is that your harumping indignation does more to put people off using your precious browser than if you just kept your mouth shut.
Every time it's due for release, they can change something else and break it. "Oh dear, Hotmail now only works with Internet Explorer 13 and you view your e-mail as an H.264 video of your favourite television anchorman reading it to you. You can't have Jon Stewart, we don't like him, but you.can have Stephen Colbert. They say he's ironic, whetever -that- means! Then they laughed! Why did they laugh?"
"The problem begins after clicking on an email to preview it or going into a different folder. When I do this, the page continually reloads," wrote one tester.
Well that's been happening with me for ages using version Firefox 3.6.13 while checking Hotmail. I don't remember exactly when it started, but I do remember it didn't happen immediately after a Firefox upgrade. I just took it for what it's worth, Microsoft messing more code up.
The problem these days is that most web 2.0 sites are a highly obfuscated mass of JS so Microsoft would be in the best position to assist trying to figure out what the problem is. They'd have the unobfuscated source on a dev box to test with. I wonder how far that help would extend. It may even be that it's a case that MS worked around a bug in FF3.6 and now their workaround is biting them in a functional FF4.x.
Mozilla have only once managed to produce a major Firefox release in under a year (Firefox 2.0 back in 2006 took 11 months).
Firefox 3.6 was released in January last year, so they're about on track. Looking forward to using Firefox 4 as my main browser... should be well worth the wait.
The release cycle is not important. Lots of good software is destroyed bye those who force release cycles for, typically Christmas or something or release just before or after the competing company.
Much better to release when the product is ready.
In this case MS seems to be the problem and not Mozilla, however.
I am sure that the article did not state - Microsoft Hotmail is the only thing stopping Firefox going into RC / Release - just seems a few people have drawn that conclusion. Is there not only one conclusion to this story - Firefox is not ready for RC and has bugs remaining, some a fault of the program and others a fault or poor sites?
There is a nice presentation by the Google Chrome team regarding their release schedule: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg63dpc6_4d7vkk6ch
The main point is preventing the infamous death march which affects so many projects. Mozilla should take notes. I, for one, don't want their developers burning out.
Is it just me or is Safari on the iPad pretty braindead?
- Seems to crash often.
- Its rendering of Google newsgroups is atrocious.
- And it is pretty clueless at selecting text within a gmail message, always selects everything.
Not entirely sure, but it seems worse than the iPhone Safari. Of course, there's a bunch of webpages I would never have been looking at on an iPhone.
The world would be alright if I used Opera on the iFad. I just need to see the light and surely one of its fanbois will remind me about it.
p.s. Biggest thing I would like from FF4 is restraing in RAM hogging. Hah, likely.
there are still 100s using hotmail ? .. are these people having problems with their @aol accounts ?
please, is this 1999 or April 1 (?) .. people I know at microsoft don't even use hotmail ..
Firefox needs to load badly written pages from the makers of a crap browser served from the maker of crap webserver / mailserver software ?
<shakes head> .. really ?
I have been a FF user since it was launched. Confounded by the Hotmail bug in FF 4b10, I tried Opera. The experience is enjoyable - functionality is about the same as FF, the UI is slick and the speed is refreshing.
Funny thing is though, Opera seems attract fanboys of a particularly silly and irksome kind. Regular fanboyism is a bit of fun - Linux vs Windows, iPhone vs Android - it's all good clean banter.
But you dare mention "Opera" in any forum, and every 13 year-old in the UK immediately logs to berate us, repeating the party line ad nauseum. It's becoming the worst "feature" of the Opera browser - it is used by jerks - who wants to be in that club?
Waiting for Windows to stop blanking out all the icons on the desktop and then redrawing them all again slowly?
True, though, that (at least the Windows version of) FF is in severe danger of bloating itself out of existence.
But, remember, it isn't over until the fat lady sings, which is what happens in an ....
Oh! Sorry, I nearly said it!