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Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
The summary rambled on about bug fixes and other things that tend not to matter to the end product of FF3.6. Most of the people that read slashdot understand the release process for software. You releases a beta/RC, fix some bugs, release the pre-release. If all is good, you release the final product.
It would have been more useful to cover new features and things that would interest the end-user. At least that's my point of view on the topic...
Useful info from the article:
Among the new features in Firefox 3.6 are built-in support for the scaled-down browser skins dubbed "Personas;" warnings of out-of-date plug-ins; support for new CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies; support for full-screen video embedded with the video HTML tag; and support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).
TraceMonkey has also been refreshed to boost JavaScript performance, something Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief engineer, bragged about last week on Twitter. "I am excited about upcoming JS [JavaScript] engine work, and I don't care who knows it," Shaver tweeted.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Actually kind of makes me wonder. I keep getting updates pushed like crazy, and just about every time that I restart my browser (running a pretty stable system, so it may be days or weeks), I get a new Firefox update. You push off the updates and say "never" or "ask me later," and you are completely ignored because it starts updating when you restart your browser regardless of what you checked. Incredibly patronizing. Makes it hard to run an old version. There may be security risks with old versions, but at least they're generally known a little better than the ones known in the new versions that are being crammed down your throat on a daily basis.
Then for some of my clients' intranet sites, there's this thing about not being able to turn off security for "risky" (certificate broken) sites that pose no threat but I have no control over and have to add an exception for every time. The browser.ssl_override_behavior setting is there, but it is completely ignored now, just like the "never update" option.
Every new version of Firefox removes my control a little more, and it has gotten really old. It makes me wonder what version 3.6 is going to bring--if anything--and why they keep changing things for the sake of changing them.
You know who else knows how to elevate?
The Daleks.
Firefox at this point is really quite reasonable with its memory use - I can't get my head around the continual complaints. The only area where it's appreciably worse performing than Chrome is in UI responsiveness and this has significantly improved in 3.5. It also has far faster back/forward navigation through the cache and (although I don't have figures for this) it feels faster at displaying pages without extremely heavy javascript. There's also less flicker - most pages load in one paint rather than loading in sections. Besides that, web browsers have a lot of useful RAM caching they can do (your history, uncompressed images etc) - it hardly makes sense to keep browser usage below 174MB when even netbooks come with 1-2GB and that RAM can be used effectively to speed up the browser. Frankly, if you're too stingy to splash out on a stick of RAM use xterm with lynx or another browser from the era when that amount of RAM was normal.
That's an odd question considering that Firefox continues to gain market share.
Perhaps you should ask yourself if "smaller" and "faster" are really the dominant factors driving users to switch browsers.
*sigh* back to work...