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Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 Released
An anonymous reader writes with word of the release of the first alpha of Firefox 3.6, "intended for developers and testers only." "As with Firefox 3.5, there are improvements to the performance; pages render faster, and pages with JavaScript code run much faster with the new Tracemonkey engine. Although this Firefox version carries the code name 'Namoroka' Alpha 1, it is also currently referred to as Firefox.next. And like other Firefox Alphas, it does not bear the Firefox logo. This release uses the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and will likely include several interface improvements in later versions, such as new graphical tab-switching behavior, which was removed from 3.5 with Beta 2."
Update: 08/09 03:54 GMT by T : Read more at InaTux.com.
you know, not everyone has a new computer and frankly I am glad that at least some developers don't make the same assumption you just did. This is especially important considering the rising popularity of smaller notebooks that even bare Windows XP has trouble booting.
How old are these machines that some people are running? My families oldest computer is from 1997 and runs Windows 95, should people expect that to be supported? If you slimmed down an XP install to run on older hardware and it can't handle a modern web browser is that the creators' fault? I can understand your grievance about netbooks, some are just plain underpowered for 3 tasks at once and you need to use the applications that it can handle, but how long is hardware supposed to be supported by software? 10, 20, 30 years?
the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient. BUt really, why shouldn't software be capable of running on hardware for over a decade- we've got a 12 year old compaq sitting in the basement that has less hard drive space than my ram is and yet it can surf the net just fine... The problem comes when devs start to think that they shouldn't be tasked with improving code efficiency because they aren't coding for older hardware. Well all I can say is maybe they should. If an old geezer compaq can hack it just fine on the internet today why can't newer versions of software that do the same basic things cope as well?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The whole concept of tabs, in the first place, was that of a tabbed folder, like a 3-ring binder with those little plastic tabs so you can find your place. That was the visual "metaphor" that was being followed. By visually detaching the tabs from the pages they control, the metaphor is broken, and the eye does not follow as naturally from the page to the tab, or vice versa.
A plugin like Flash should not be ABLE to lock up the browser. No, that's not the fault of Flash, it's the fault of the browser that _allows_ it to happen. The browser should be in control of the plugin, not the other way around.