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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."
did they fix THE memory leak?
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
The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Under OSX it's a giant leap forward compared to Version 2.X. It runs nearly as fast as safari, crashes less and does not consume all ram like the older versions love to do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
From the release notes:
Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
Why is this Firefox's job? Isn't that the point of Anti Virus?
Summation 2
When will there be a properly-supported 64 bit version? Assuming 64 bit is the future, delaying it will only increase the difficulty of adding 64-bit compatability later. I know there are third-party builds but they're not updated regularly and their reliability is questionable.
apterous.org
What's the story on the wmode flash transparency issue? Last I heard Adobe was waiting for Mozilla to put some sort of code into the Linux version of their browser in order for the wmode fix in Adoobe Flash to work properly. Or maybe it's the other way around now? Anybody have a clue? How can I show somebody Linux/Firefox as an alternative to Windows/IE when this problem drastically affects the functionality of many websites out there?
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.
Yea! And all those Windows users should also be ashamed of themselves for not using IE! And don't even get me started on Linux users who don't use Lynx. Using Linux with a graphical program! How irresponsible!
I hate printers.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2
Not bad.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I kind of agree with them. This is a waste of memory and time for the huge majority of people. We are talking about a project which is already under attack for it's bad memory usage. I understand why they don't want to go that road. It, to the least, show that their can be other points of view and that you do not need to be that aggressive with them.
A web developer will probably not use "view source" very much anyway. Try firebug. That's the way to go if you really want to understand a page. You'll rarely need "view source" after that.
Normally I'm somewhat against feature creep, but I think that the new features added are all very, very good. Most are security concerns, and some just make the dang thing easier, more eficient, and smoother to use (star button to add fav bookmark). The added features seem to not be of the bells and whistles type.
The attention to reducing memory footprint, mem leaks, and speed are all very well received, and thoughtful. It seems to be a big push of this release to concentrate on that.
This seems like a very nice release and improvement. - I particulary like the thunderbird anti-phishing tie in.
..........FULL STOP.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
I don't care whether Mozilla is "a company with a profit interest" or not. What I care about is the product - if some people are making money, well, good for them. This isn't Communism, you know... (yeah, that's gonna cost me).
One of the many things that make Open Source Software so great is that you can just fork it if you don't like the direction the product is headed in.
I seriously don't understand the animosity towards Mozilla for becoming a "real" company. It's enabling them to do a lot of great things that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
And, if you don't like it, fork it!
To put it bluntly: You're sh*t out of luck.
See here for the discussion that basically goes:
Us: This is terrible behaviour and hugely inconsistent. It will confuse novice users with inconsistency and searching in an address bar and it'll annoy power users who used to be able to consistently locate the places they wanted to go based on the URL (which they remembered and which remained consistent). If we wanted to search then we'd search. Yes, it can be useful in some situations, but if we know what we want to type then we don't want the browser thinking it is better than me and incorrectly second-guessing what we want.
Them: Everyone searches, and it learns. Searching is the future, so we're going to make you search.
The two sites I visit most at work are Slashdot and the BBC news (news.bbc.co.uk). What used to turn up top for "ne", "new" and "news"? The BBC news, because I wanted to go there and it matched what I typed. What turns up now? Slashdot because of "news for nerds" in the title. It needs huge amounts more weighting on URL starts than titles, but they don't seem willing to change it.
The other one that really annoys me is one of my sites. I could normally go to "sk" and hit it as first result, but now I've got to type even more of it and it doesn't make it to the top until after I've done the whole domain (because the domain is in the title of another page that always turns up top).
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.
I was very impressed with FF 3 beta 3, but beta 4 seems much much faster even than beta 3. Firefox 3 looks like it'll be really great.
The only downside is as usual, a lot of extension authors need to bump their version checks again - a lot of my extensions that were working with FF 3 beta 3 don't work with beta 4 (due to the version check)
Mike
Linux fan and Win32 developer
You can try out 3 Beta 4 without disrupting your Firefox 2 install on Windows by using Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 4. It's designed for portable devices (USB flash drives, iPods, portable hard drives), but you can also just run it from your desktop.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
The address bar behaviour seems odd, but it might be OK when I'm used to it. There should definitely be a way of switching back to the normal behaviour though.
This is good, but can't we put the responsibility on the system where it *really* belongs? Viruses, not Firefox, should inform the AV system when malicious code is about to executed.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Also known as IceWeasel, as may have noticed those who followed the recent problems of firefox branding and the consecutive fork.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm also running FF3 beta 4, and I can say: IT IS FAST. It is probably the fastest browser I have used, ever. I don't necessarily like all the changes, and agree the new icons are a little homely, but the speed is undeniable, and those other quibbles are largely cosmetic.
For those of you on Windows who don't want to hose your registry with multiple Firefox installs, I highly recommend the portable version. In fact, for 20 different reasons I recommend the portable version of not only Firefox, but all your Windows apps:
http://portableapps.com/news/2008-03-11_-_firefox_portable_3_beta_4
It's not a real package management system, but it beats the hell out of installing and reinstalling tons of crap in Windows. I think in many ways it also beats most Linux package managers I've dealt with.
I also want to submit a complaint about a lack of x64 apps in general. There is still no Skype for 64 bit Linux, for example, and that's just plain bad form.
Keep rocking Mozilla! Keep rocking FOSS! Keep rocking portableapps.com!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
People hate this feature because its behavior is too unpredictable (breaking one of the fundamental UI guidelines), unintuitive (there is no apparent rule to how it orders the suggestions - a set of search preferences is not an apparent rule), cannot reasonably approximate the old behavior, and is often slow to boot. The intentions are great, but the feature has too many problems to be usable.
You're right that the suggestions can be deleted - nice find. Too bad you can't delete all suggestions from a particular site or pattern at once.
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You are (almost) in luck. Firefox's integrated auto-updater will now, as part of the dialog telling you there's a new version and asking if you want to upgrade, list your extensions and highlight which are and aren't compatible (and lets you do a bulk "check for updates" at the same time). It's quite slick, I was impressed.
But that doesn't help you if you're upgrading from 2.0.x or if you're not receiving the new version through the built-in updater.