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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.
That's some nice eye candy. But will Firefox stay relevant? Chrome is coming up fast and Mozilla seems to be stagnating. It sad to be in a state where your only source of income is your competitor.
From an earlier post of mine:
Mozilla corporation seems to be pretty badly run. They solicited donations for the NYT ad(some of my poor college friends scraped together money for it) while overpaying the CEO($500K per year)! The management was supposed to find different ways of getting funding but Mozilla is still dependent totally on Google(which competes with it's own rival browser). Mozilla made $66 million in revenue just in 2006 while development was largely done by unpaid volunteers.
In the meantime, Firefox was quite bloated, crash prone and lost the speed race to Chrome, Thunderbird stagnated and nothing really innovative or useful came out of Mozilla labs. Ubuntu will probably switch to Chromium and Firefox will start losing search revenue. . Probably the only thing going for Firefox are extensions(Chrome supports extensions now) and proper Adblock. Things are so bad that the CEO is planning to step down
Sad to see one of the epitomes of FOSS go down in flames like this.
This space for rent.
with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open
Ah. I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows, for easy of cross-referencing without going backward and forward or digging around in bookmarks and waiting for pages to load. Firefox will randomly lockup once very other week or so (sometimes twice in one day, sometimes it'll be fine for a month). Oddly enough, it's not usually flash that causes the lockup, and memory leakage has never been a problem (rarely tops a gigabyte).
I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows
Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong.
30-40 tabs? Fine, whatever. *300-400*? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell can you even manage to *find* the tabs you need? What, did you never learn about that fancy feature called "bookmarks"?
Have you tried Read It Later? Seems like that might fit your browsing model.
202,704 crashes in the latest version in the last 14 days.
And?
Firefox's installed base is >250,000,000 users according to a quick Google search, so if those crashes are random then it means that less than 0.1% of Firefox users saw a crash in the last two weeks. More likely a large fraction of them are systematic crashes due to some crappy addon.
Either way, a 0.1% chance of a crash in two weeks is a pretty strange definition of 'unstable'.