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Firefox 4.0 Beta Candidate Available
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."
Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S : Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.
Nice that it was two links deep from the main article...
Download link from Mozilla Nightlies.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups
Looking at the past few releases of Firefox, the developers just simply do not care to address it like the problem has been solved. Yet, they continue to perfect their crash and restart tools so when the browser does become unstable (and it always becomes unstable for me after a few hours of hard use) restarting is at least not too painful. Yet, this reeks of addressing the symptom instead of the cause. Have a problem with the browser? Restart it. Yes -- firefox has become the Windows 95 of browsers.
I'd wish they'd just slow down, take a breath, and get their house in order. I'd rather have a stable browser instead of the latest flavor of the month feature addition.
I hate to break it to you, but as chrome adds those features it's going to slow down and get sluggish. Firefox has for some time beat Chrome on memory use. But, OTOH it's somewhat mooted by the fact that Chrome tends to spy and seems to thwart disabling intrusive ads.
That's why I use SRWare Iron. Google spyware removed from Chrome :)
As for features, let's see if Chrome slows down. The Google coders have been doing a better job than the Firefox ones for the last couple of years so perhaps Chrome will be able to grow and not slow down?
More to the point, they assume it's a problem with Firefox that all other users see, not a problem with how Firefox is installed or configured on their computer, so they don't bother to fix the problem. If they would go discuss the problems at the Mozilla support forum or MozillaZine, they would find that most others are not having these problems.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I am continually baffled by people talking about how unreliable and crash-prone Firefox is.
On my laptop with Windows 7 (and XP before it) I have kept Firefox running for weeks at a time (I hibernate my laptop with Firefox running and hardly ever actually reboot it) under heavy usage; multiple windows, 30+ tabs in each window, many with Flash components and JS-intensive pages. I run Adblock, Noscript, Flashgot, Tree-style Tabs, Lazarus, Form History Control and several other add-ons. Firefox has crashed on me exactly once in the past year or so, and that seemed to be due to Flash. When that happened, Firefox restored my multi-window multi-tabbed session without an issue.
I run Firefox on my desktop workstation as well with similar results. Likewise on a EEE running Ubuntu. Contrary to reports from you and others, I've found it to be one of the most rock-solid application I've ever used.
While I realize anecdotes do not constitute data, I'm curious as to how you and others GET Firefox to crash so regularly!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
While it slowly builds up to 800MB of RAM used, even though you've closed every tab except for one...
"Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes."
I love software that doesn't swap UIs every major release!
Except that the UI was indeed swapped. It got a more Chrome/Opera look now.
This space for rent.
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
Are there still memory leaks in Firefox?
Anyway most of the time people feel like Firefox is leaking while it isn't, due to caching. At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.
Give it a try ;)
Here be signatures
Boy, I wish I could mod this up. Iron is definitely a scam. (I was in the chromium irc channel when its developer came on the scene, and he openly admitted he was just playing on people's fears. It seems his goal is to make money with google ads on the download page.) Disclaimer: I used to work on Chromium at Google, now I'm just a happy user.
At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.
That's the disk cache, not the memory cache.
Also, the numbers reported by Firefox as "used memory cache" are about 10% of the total memory used on my system. So, Firefox claims that only 80MB are used for memory cache, while Windows reports that 800MB is being used by the firefox.exe process.
If you want something fixed, you need to show how it negatively impacts FARMVILLE. That @#@$@% application is driving everything now.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
See this post if you are curious ... while you may be having the optimal experience, many of us are not - http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702398&cid=32733482
I would recommend the following:
Release versions have been quite unstable on Flash heavy sites some time ago. I have switched to nightly builds several months ago and - barring the occasional hiccup when new features are introduced - have found it to run incredibly stable and performant even with a larger selection of extensions installed.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
This account is wrong. Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet.
- Asa Dotzler
Mozilla
The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income.
The Moz Foundation hasn't published a financial report since 2008. Tax Returns and Financial Information
It is really, really, tough to get good, hard numbers on the financial state of the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation
Sounds like you just need to stop visiting TV Tropes.
Flash also has a retarded garbage collector that's incapable of cleaning up large objects. Oh, and you can't force it to do a cleanup, so if it decides your object is too big, it's stuck in memory forever. Good luck optimizing that.
Linkey: http://www.andymoore.ca/2010/03/motherfucking-as3-garbage-collection/
Two things:
-Are you on the same web pages in both browsers? Not all web pages take the same amount of memory (obviously). This can differ by a factor.
-When you're adding up the memory of each process, are you adding up the private working set? If you're on Windows XP with default setting, you're not, and thus the total memory usage is completely wrong with this way of adding it up.
With correct memory calculation, here, for our internal apps, we can honestly only recommend Chrome/Opera and, ironically, IE8. IE6-7 and Firefox work peachy, but the memory usage is totally out of wack.
Windows is stupid enough to swap everything out
No, it's you who is following some cargo cultic advice and noticing the placebo speed-up. Windows is always going to write lazily to the page file so that when you need a lot of memory in a hurry, it doesn't need to page anything out to disk, it just reallocates the physical memory of some pages that have been marked as already copied to the swap file. If you don't use need that memory for something else then, yes it will be in the swap file, but it will still be in RAM ready to be accessed instantly if you need it again. In any case, don't take my word for it, people no less knowledgable than, Mark Russinovich recommend having a page file (as well as how to figure out how big you need it to be). Yes you can run without a page file, but then you'll run into the "Low Memory" issue long before that memory is actually used, and you forfeit the ability to save crash dumps, and you gain next to nothing for speed.
My father-in-law hates Firefox. After spending three hours installing all the add-ons he thought looked good, it ran like molasses and crashed all the time. You did ask :-)
Well, addons would indeed be the logical thing to ask about when people are apparently having so much trouble with Firefox. I only use Adblock Plus (but I've had probably up to 6 addons installed at once before, all privacy and ad related) and have (almost) always been solidly stable.
I say "almost" because this discussion has reminded me of a time when an addon was causing the Firefox process to hang on exit. It was happening to my friend too. After we uninstalled the addon, the problem disappeared. And even though that was annoying, it still wasn't a crash.
So if you're having issues with Firefox, start uninstalling all your useless, fluffy, garbage addons and see what happens.
about:memory in chrome is handy for comparing memory usage between browsers you have open. No calculation needed!