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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.
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.
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Living With a Nerd
Firefox will still be used so long as Chrome maintains its policy of not really allowing any major customizations. Firefox lets you customize -EVERYTHING-, seriously, type in about:config in Firefox, until Chrome lets you do this, I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The CEO was planning on leaving within a year when he joined. T
The CEO planning on leaving within a year somehow justifies the needlessly fat paycheck?
. The fact that Mozilla still gets the majority of money from Google doesn't mean they're not looking for other sources of income.
It's what now, 6 years and still no success in cultivating other sources of income? I mean the management is paid top bucks for doing exactly that, right?
Most Mozilla development is done by paid Mozilla employees
Err, that wasn't quite what we heard when we were complaining about bloat and memory leaks. All we got was 'if you don't like it, fork it' and we had no right to complain because it was the work of unpaid volunteers working in their free time.
I mean, if people are getting paid, how hard is it to assign them boring tasks but which matter a lot to the end user? It's not just about scratching your itch when you're getting paid.
. The $66 million revenue will help tide them over if they stop receiving funding from Google. Firefox is not getting bloated or crash-prone
Not if the money is being squandered on C-level executives.
I'm not trying to find fault or lay blame. I'm pointing out that it's ridiculous to assume that because you have a problem with Firefox that everyone else sees the same problem. When you go out to your car in the morning and it doesn't start, do you say that your car manufacturer is making defective cars, or do you simply get it fixed? It has nothing to do with whose "fault" it is. It has to do with effectively dealing with problems instead of immediately assuming it is the fault with the manufacturer. Forget about whose fault it is!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Even Netscape navigator is still used by a minority. That's not the point. How many people knows about "about:config", or wants to?
I guess most slashdotters are driven to FF by the extensions; but most of its users were "converted" from IE just because its (perceived and real) vulnerable nature against malware.
Ditto. I don't dislike Chrome as a browser, but I hate the UI- its everything I hate in a UI, and more. From replacing labels with abstract pictures, to hiding menus within super-menus instead of having toolbars.
I can only hope the default GNOME version is more sane, as I do hate having to replace "themes".
I like to think of each window with tabs as a stack. One page leads you to another, push another tab on the stack. When you're done with that task, pop the tab off the stack. Bookmarks are too permanent. I may never need that tab again. But I might, so I'm glad it's there when I get back to it. Lots of times I'll come to a stopping point and close a bunch of tabs, going back a week or more. Then I'll dig up some tab that I had entirely forgotten about, would not have cared enough to bookmark, but it serves as a good start for more browsing.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway,
a) Reloads... who really cares?
b) No, they're a complete hierarchy for organization. They're only a list if you don't know how to use 'em.
But, whatever, if that's how you want to use FF, hey, go nuts. But don't complain if it starts to behave strangely. Any sane person should realize you're *way* outside of the "supported functionality" envelope and are basically abusing the tabbed browsing metaphor (badly).
But what's abusive about it? That style of browsing, to me, is what tabs are for.
I'm sorry, no, that's absolutely false.
The tab metaphor was *never* intended to accomodate *hundreds* of live tabs. If it were, there would be better mechanisms for organizing tabs, finding them, etc. No, the tab metaphor is meant for *maybe* dozens of tabs, tops.