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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 4
Somecallmechief writes "Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso."
There are at least two major bugs that have been there forever. I don't know if they annoy everyone, or affect everyone or just the people I talk to.
:-)
1) The damn proxy prompt window. For god's sake, if there's already one open window asking for the proxy user/pass, don't open another 20 at the same time. This is quite easy to reproduce: From a firefox that needs proxy to get out, go to any bookmark folder and choose 'Open All in tabs'.
2) For the life of me I can't figure out why sometimes the vertical scroll bar dissapear. It's not a specific page. Once the scroll bar is gone, it's gone forever, no matter what I load in that tab - if I open another tab it's all fine.
Yes I've opened bug reports for this. And no, I'm not fixing it myself, I've got my own projects to take care of.
Go ahead and mod me troll, I just needed to vent
Been using this all morning and so far it's been nice and speedy for me. It's been much faster than the previous betas and there's definitely a significant improvement with most google aps (among others, but I use these all the time). Might not be many new features over Beta 3, but the speed increase and reduced memory footprint (it's still quite big, but better than previous versions - around 100Mb usage after about 6 hours of constant browsing) are very welcome. If this trend continues, the final release should be the best since 1.0.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I've been using the nightly builds for a couple weeks now, and they're flagged as beta 5... I figured beta 4 had been out for a while already.
For what it's worth: I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing of Firefox 3 so far. It's faster, uses less memory, and I really like the new address bar features, and the bookmarking. (It has tagging built into the bookmarks now.)
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass. Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance. I'd say supporting standards is definitely a priority for Mozilla. Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD? I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
it's more efficient for firefox to raise some kind of event than for an AV program to pick up this information on its own by polling.
No, it is a stupid question that gets asked over and over again, and answered over and over again.
There is no one major memory leak.
1 - Most major complex apps have small leaks. It is damn near impossible to plug all of them, but Firefox has been plugging away at these very heavily for some time.
2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.
3 - Firefox uses a bunch of memory after you've been browsing a while. THIS IS A STANDARD FEATURE, AND NOT A MEMORY LEAK. Firefox doesn't just a cache of files downloaded, it keeps in memory a cache of fully rendered pages. If you don't like this feature, then you can adjust it, or turn it off completely.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
For more discussion on the new UI themes and changes, there's a thread going on at mozillaZine about it.
The icons will grow on you after a while, and they're still making refinements and changes to the icons and backgrounds. Personally, I think the Back/Forward buttons are pretty decent, it's the rest (Reload/Stop/New tab/window) that looks a little too simple and out of place. Can't say I really agree with using different themes across different Windows versions too, this has to be the first application I know that tries that.
To settle the Firefox 64-bit question. I use Ubuntu 64-bit and am a contributer to the 64-bit forums. Firefox can be compiled for 64-bit. However, Flash and Java are only available in 32-bit. Adobe in particular is very stubborn about releasing versions of it's software for architectures other than x86. 64-bit Firefox will work with fine even with 32-bit Flash and Java using a plugin that was released with Ubuntu 7.10.
So, in summary don't blame Mozilla for Adobe's stubbornness. You can sign the petition to Adobe here, although it is unlikely to make a difference. The problem appears to be across Adobe's entire product line and on every operating system.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The Mozilla Foundation which owns the Corp has funded several projects in 2007.
Current work includes improving l10n tools Community Giving and Tools for the L10n Process
2006 10k USD to openbsd to continue development of openbsd and openssh. Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/03/31
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson