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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.
More importantly is it gonna finally fix the memory leak issue?
Mount your Failfoxes.
Nice that it was two links deep from the main article...
Download link from Mozilla Nightlies.
Is anyone else getting an immediate segfault when using the Linux x86-64 build? It happens right after starting it.
I know the quality of Firefox has dropped off significantly lately, as many contributors have moved towards Chrome, but this is totally absurd. I've never had betas of any other browser, including Opera, Chrome and Konqueror, crash on me like this.
Does that mean I won't have to rely on Flash for pr0n now, saving a kW or two and reducing my carbon footprint?
Link to linux downloads too? or general downloads?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups
I knew Firefox was piss slow compared to Chrome, but my god to see how slow is sad. It's why I have been slowly migrating to Chrome where I can, though the lack of some features I need (such as a master password) make Chrome not an option for all the places I need to work. I hope Firefox starts improving as its add-ins and features will only last so long as the other more modern browsers catch up on features next...
...of excess bloat.
But there currently is no single browser without it's shortcomings really...
"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!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.
crazy dynamite monkey
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?
I was a long time advocate of Firefox until 3.x. I don't know if it's the fact that websites are more heavily scripted than before or if Firefox is just getting slower (or both!) but c'mon guys! Speed is key.
Ditto. I loved Phoenix->Firefox for a long time. But it has gotten to be like an old gas guzzling 1970s car! :) I am not sure I agree with the addage that features=bloat=slower application. Well coded applications can add features and not slow down -- it is possible!
What features did they bring over from Chrome?
The new UI is terrible, and appears to be trying to (badly) emulate Chrome. The worst part is that, by default, minimize/maximize/close buttons are not present, which hurts usability badly. The good news is that this can be restored to the previous UI with a few clicks... I hope that options remains present in the final release.
Chromium(Chrome) and Opera are eating their lunch in performance (even IE is kicking their ass), they have started emulating Chromium's look, and they have no presence in the mobile market.
Me thinks rough days are ahead for Mozilla's favorite project.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
The default theme is very different; personas look better now. Performance is fine; it is faster than before and is roughly identical to Chrome on this computer. Some UI things were changed (for example, the Add-on manager now opens in a tab). All in all, it's a nice release so far.
I'm writing from v.4 now.. and I must say I'm quite underwhelmed. 1) Orange button - make it smaller (icon only), and place it to the left of the tabs. Waste of space having it above them. 2) Tabs - put them at the top. Tabs in the title bar space is a great idea. Don't half-copy chrome. 3) "Always do this" checkbox in download dlg still doesn't work. Nobody cares whether it's the server's config that's at fault: Make that checkbox work. 4) Performance - slowest JS available. Guys. Seriously. What the hell is going on? I've loved firefox since the wee days, but honestly.. this isn't looking good. To the firefox team: please get out of whatever rut you're stuck in, or prepare to be swallowed whole by google.
I knew Firefox was piss slow compared to Chrome, but my god to see how slow is sad. It's why I have been slowly migrating to Chrome where I can, though the lack of some features I need (such as a master password) make Chrome not an option for all the places I need to work.
I hope Firefox starts improving as its add-ins and features will only last so long as the other more modern browsers catch up on features next...
At Javascript, you mean. On Windows XP/7 Firefox seems faster than Chrome at html/images/flash.
And I use chromium, because I don't like Google's or SRWare's spyware ;)
>> Well coded applications can add features and not slow down -- it is possible!
Take a look at Opera for an example of this. People may disagree with interface and philosophy of Opera, but it is blazingly fast in Windows.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I can offer these comments:
a) rendering speed was generally very good
b) while I did not have issues of 'crashing', I did have issues with seemingly random pegging of the cpu.
c) start up time to restore multiple open tabs was unpredictable - sometimes very quick other times never finished (a named tag but blank page)
d) most, if not all, extensions no longer work and the usual workarounds seemed to stop working too. this was #*! annoying.
Based primarily on (d) and also (b), I stopped using 3.7a5 about two weeks ago reverted back to 3.6. While I do have my extensions back, I noticed that 3.6 has developed the (b) problem too. Ultimately this will result in my moving to Opera or Chrome - I'm just sick of browser lock up. And while memory use had looked to have improved going into the 3.6 series, it seems to have gone downhill again - no so much a memory leak but general piggyness (hence Firepig).
I've used Mozilla based browsers since day one, ie, Netscrape. Firefox I think has lost the way again. Simplicity and speed should always be priority #1. Real world usage of Firefox shows that not to be the case any more, or if it is, not done well.
it's funny i start reading this page by pure chance, i was checking the browsing speed i gained after enabling firefox dns prefetch, fasterfox, and combined with local bind9 and squid caching...the result is simply monstruous!!!
needless to say i tested speed against the mammoth that is /. , now i can go back to premium wasting of time here!!!!!
I'm baffled why people think SRWare Iron is a reliable source. It's doesn't even have an open repository to check it, only source snapshots. It's from an unknown organization. Why should you trust it more than you trust Google?
"Memory leak" is such a harsh term. It implies poor development practices, poor development tools, and developer negligence. Those are all really bad things, and could make the Firefox developers feel really sad. They might even start crying, and we don't want that. :(
We prefer to describe it as "memory liberation". Instead of being shackled into use storing data against its will, Firefox is compassionate enough to liberate this memory; to set it free, if you will. No longer chained into slavery, the potential of this memory is endless! It could grow up to become a doctor, or a lawyer, an accountant, and maybe even President of the United States of America! It will be able to make a real difference in the world. Thank you, Firefox developers, for caring so much about memory and being such kind, gentle folk.
All the new browser are memory hunger, except firefox which consumes half of ram, and the speed is negligible.
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
Why has Mozilla Foundation avoided fixing the biggest bugs in Firefox, the memory leaks? Many, many people have complained about the memory leaks for the last 5 years, at least, as did the parent comment.
Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable. Apparently the Firefox memory leak bugs interact with some weakness in Windows XP SP3, and that causes Windows to become unstable. It seems that whoever debugs Firefox might also gain a good reputation from finding a major problem in Windows.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version lists Crashes with evidence of memory corruption as one of the fixes. Those crashes are only the ones automatically reported by the crash reporter. Many of the crashes happen without invoking the crash reporter. Firefox is crashy.
We love Firefox because it has the add-ons we need. But we need it to be stable. I hope version 4 reverses the history of bad management at Mozilla Foundation. Remember, Foundation gets more than $50 million from Google every year to make Google the default search engine.
Mozilla Foundation has an enormous amount of cash: "Total assets as of December 31, 2008 were $116 million, up from $99 million at the end of 2007, an increase of 17% to our asset base." The foundation was run by Mitchell Baker, a lawyer with little or no technical knowledge and very limited social ability. Now that she is Chairwoman and no longer CEO, the management does not seem sufficiently improved.
The parent comment is currently marked "Flamebait". People have commented saying that they have no problems.
Some of the instabilities are difficult to debug because they don't always occur. Visit Mozilla Crash Reporter for more information. Some of the instabilities occur because of the interaction of Firefox with Microsoft Windows, apparently, when Firefox reaches the limit of installed memory and begins to require virtual memory. Firefox is more stable in Linux, apparently.
There is a web page discussing Firefox crashes and what users can do about it.
Look at the current crash statistics.
See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures in the current version of Firefox, 3.6.6.
It seems that an organization that has more than $100 million in assets could stop other work and address the instabilities.
Much more could be written, but that's enough for now.
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.
Somehow everyone seems to miss, that this “Chromification” actually is a Opera-ism, which was from the very beginning designed like this, because it had tabs from the very beginning.
It’s funny how everything always comes back to Opera’s choices of detail implementation being the best.
I, for one, thank the only innovators in the business. There’s a reason they are the only ones who are remotely profitable with making browsers.
Also: It’s 2010, right? We have mouse gestures, rocker gestures, keys, lots of buttons on the mice... and they are still insulting us with buttons. I mean, back and forward buttons? Really? At least make them only visible in “beginner mode” or something. This is silly.
It’s the same thing that is disturbing me about window management: Using tiny 3px virtual buttons (as opposed to physical ones) and 1px drag areas for window management.
I did away with those things for window management, as soon as I started using Compiz. (Which, opposite to its reputation is actually a much better window manager, when you focus on the shortcuts/mouse actions and windows rules aspects, instead of the bling.)
I use Win+MouseX, where X is one of the 5 buttons of my mouse, and is assigned to moving, resizing, closing, maximizing/restoring and minimizing. With a added Shift key, the buttons are assigned to virtual desktop management. I even removed all task bars. I only toggle the “widget” layer etc by a click in the corner of the screen. Which gives me status infos and allows me to start new apps or open documents. I find it to be extremely easy, fast, and efficient. (I also have keyboard-only alternatives for everything.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This is the release candidate of the first beta, with the nighties, and not the real beta 1.
This man is clearly an ego-stroking troll. A rare breed, if I ever there was one! ;)
[UID-HeinzIntel]
"Faster" and "more secure" are sexy new features. "Fixed memory leak we were blaming on plug-ins/add-ons/users/Microsoft/cosmic rays anyway" doesn't make such a good headline.
I thought the point of the Mozilla Foundation was to employ people to fix these kinds of un-sexy bugs that were being ignored by OS developers. Instead they seem to just want to break people's workflows as often as possible. "Innovation" (or in this case copying Chrome) for the sake of itself is not the same as "making it better".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It is this spyware aspect of Chrome that bothers me most. OK, it is reasonably snappy (but so is FF if you don't overload it), and the UI is OK if you happen to like it. (I'm not a huge fan, but I'm quite happy to admit that's just me.)
But the handful of extensions that I find most useful with FF are exactly those that Google has no commercial interest in permitting to function, so I'll leave Chrome to those who like it. Memory use isn't an issue at all: none of my machines are that powerful by today's standards, but I NEVER have problems with Firefox swamping my RAM. I would contend that anyone who finds that it does so should take a good look at how they are using it. Think of it like this (and no, I will NOT use a car analogy):
If you work a power-tool really hard, you have to allow intervals where you let it cool down and you take time to sharpen the cutting edges. Similarly, it makes sense to close your browser (or any non-trivial program for that matter) occasionally and allow the OS to do its garbage collection as best it can.
Stay relevant: See the Top 300 Crashing Signatures in the latest version, Firefox 3.6.6. Those are just the top 300. They don't include the crashes that don't invoke the crash reporter.
Often Slashdot discussions are degraded by people trying to make jokes.
You can disable most of the spying, or just use Chromium (the community build) instead.
As for memory use, lower memory usage isn't everything. I could go into detail about how an OS manages memory and so "XXXmb used" does not translate to actual RAM used, but the bottom line is programs using memory is not necessarily a bad thing if it makes them run better with minimal disruption to other apps. Since Firefox is by far the most heavily used app on my system and I have plenty of RAM I bumped the memory cache size up a lot to keep it moving when I have a lot of tabs open.
Consider also that Google view the browser as the OS anyway, with apps just being web sites, so it makes sense for their browser to put web app performance above low memory usage. The benefits of having each tab run in a separate process outweigh the additional memory costs too IMHO.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This much more detailed comment occurs much later in the discussion because it was moved down by comments that are mostly unhelpful or irrelevant: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use
Firefox leaks memory and eventually crashes Windows, or makes Windows unstable.
Yet back when I was still using Windows I'd typically only shut down Firefox because of a Firefox update requiring a restart or Windows Update requiriing a reboot. And I don't remember Firefox ever crashing.
Obviously it must crash or we wouldn't have those crash reports, but I haven't seen it crash on Windows in at least a couple of years. So I could hardly call it 'unstable'.
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
Right now I have MORE tabs open on firefox than I do on Chome. Firefox is using ~220MB private bytes, Chrome is using ... *adds up the 10 freaking processes*... 640MB (651MB if you count the googletalkplugin.exe).
This is OK on my development machine here, because I have 8GB, but I could see where someone with only 1-2GB might not like Chrome. It would constantly cause paging.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
I can corroborate that; No crash in Debian Linux Sid for more than four months. Also, although it uses plenty of memory, it doesn't grow continually.
Maybe it's a Windows problem, not a Firefox one?
Dilbert RSS feed
"So I could hardly call it 'unstable'."
202,704 crashes in the latest version in the last 14 days.
Those crashes do NOT include the crashes that also crash the crash reporter. Notice that almost all the crashes were observed only in Windows. That may partly reflect the fact that Windows users are much more common.
You make a lot of good points but there are a lot of holes as well you should be aware of.
...what? Ok first of all, there is a explicit barrier between kernel land and user land. In kernel land, bugs crash the OS. These are blue screens. In user land, bugs crash the individual programs that cause them. Firefox limits the amount of memory it uses in an attempt to be sure plenty is left free for breathing space. Short of a malfunctioning driver (not Firefox's fault) it's simply not as easy as you seem to imply for an OS crash to happen. Sometimes some apps include drivers than run in kernel space but Firefox is not one of them.
Somehow I doubt that. Businesses run all sorta of old legacy programs (and normal consumers do too) which I imagine would be far more unstable than a modern browser coded for and tested on modern OSs. To your credit, flash is responsible for lots of browser crashes (had a few Flash crashes last week myself) thanks to Firefox 3.6.4 maybe we'll see an improvement there.
Apparently, you don't quite known how memory management works in operating systems. The OS will swap process memory in and out of RAM/virtual memory all the time, a big time is when process switching or minimizing/restoring windows. The less physical RAM you're using and the more total memory is in use, the more swapping, of course. But Windows will not simply wait for physical memory to fill before starting to use virtual memory; it keeps a good chunk of physical memory free so that when it's needed Windows can provide it immediately rather than having to swap stuff to disk first. Furthermore the management of virtual memory is done entirely by the OS; apps cannot access physical or virtual memory directly and I find the idea that Firefox somehow has problems with it doubtful at best. I also doubt this is related to Linux stability since Linux does much the same memory management stuff AFAIK.
Be a little more realistic. I doubt they are sitting around all day and throwing parties. Contrary to popular belief, debugging is hard. Debugging bugs that cannot be reliably reproduced can be near impossible. Unreliable bugs also crash less, which means they're less likely to make the top crashers, and guess which bugs are the most important to fix first?
I would also like to point out the top crasher in your link looks like a Skype Extension DLL and not actually a Firefox component.
I don't understand why SRWare Iron is any better. Do you trust the SRWare people more than you trust the Google people? I'm not saying either is untrustworthy, btw - just that I don't see the point here, you just shifted your trust from Google to SRWare.
But to say something substantial, then I would trust Google and Mozilla with respect to their open source code. That means Chromium and Firefox - not Chrome. Chrome, unlike Chromium and Firefox, comes with lots of closed-source code - for example, Flash, but Google have honestly disclaimed that there is more, and it's good of them to make a clear distinction between Chromium and Chrome (it lets us make an informed choice which to use. I wouldn't use Chrome, but I would use Chromium). Finally, I would trust SRWare Iron the least - who I only know about from their website, which self-describes themselves as "SRWare is a software company, which is specialized on Hardware-, Software- and Onlinesolutions. Our target is focusing on Quality, reliability and usability, which we can provide you since four years."
I have just installed the published version of firefox 4 beta and have realized it does not have the buttons on the top right corner to minimize the application.
This is odd
Haha, I read that as: "... is running more smoothly and with faster crashes."
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
I would also point out that this crash information isn't available from some other browsers, so to say firefox is the most unstable is a bit silly if we don't have all the crash information.
To take the other end of the argument, you can't say that "flash crashes aren't firefox's fault" then turn around and say "I hope version x improves flash performance". In the end I would argue that most of the stability issues with these plug-ins are likely in the interface, so crashers could lie on either side of the aisle (and be fixed, sloppily, from both sides as well).
As far as os level memory allocation goes, in theory memory allocation is abstracted. In theory a software developer doesn't need distinguish where the resources are stored. There is theory then there is actually using C .
I work for a Fortune 50 that sells a product many would describe as slow and bloated. The former is true because of the latter, and the latter is true because of demand. When the product was younger it was sleek and fast. As a product tacks on features it necessarily becomes slower to accommodate them. There are possibly exceptions to that rule, but not many. Browsers are not an exception.
Either the software initializes the subsystem to support a feature at startup, or (as they usually try to do) it's initialized in the background. Unfortunately someone will come up with a killer use for that feature (either internally or externally) that requires support during startup. Invariably that means startup is slower. Tack on intricate and complex dependencies, eventually everything gets initialized at startup. Not to mention that once you ship a product, those APIs are officially supported, no matter how well they were thought out or how early they were introduced.
The perceived result is bloatware, yet there's nothing in the product except features that were demanded by the users. Firefox certainly isn't perfect, and I'm sure the developers would love to rewrite portions of the product, but most of those rewrites will gain maintainability rather than performance. Performance is usually something you squeeze out of what's already there, and both Chrome and Mozilla engineers are very capable at spotting opportunities.
It's worth noting that crash rates have been driven down significantly recently. They are indeed addressing the instabilities and tackling the problem like you demand. Pretty graphs and charts (also read the comments from Mozilla devs): http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/04/08/dramatic-stability-improvements-in-firefox/
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
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.
So your friends scraped together money for a corporation that is netting $46M/year (2007)?
Also, for a company that made $46M, a CEO salary of $500K doesn't seem completely unreasonable. It does beg the question: how many people are getting paid to develop Mozilla products, vs. how many are still open source community members?
I also wonder where all that money is going- let's remember that is NET INCOME, not revenue. If they're saving it up to have an endowment and be free(er) from Google and company, wonderful.
Please help metamoderate.
the answers to your two questions:
> How many people knows about "about:config", or wants to?
are actually the same, which is exactly why Firefox will continue to survive. Point is: if you want the configuration options, then they're there for you. But if you don't it's not like it's the only way that you can access them. They provide the best of both worlds in this respect and as such will continue to maintain a user base.
Fact of the matter is, maybe Firefox needs to suffer a little bit so that they can realize, much like they did when they splintered Firefox (then Phoenix) off of the main Mozilla browser, that they need to make some effective changes in order to maintain market share.
I encourage this. And the point isn't that FF is the best alternative, but that they're good enough to drive the commercially-driven models up to their standard. It's arguable that without Firefox, IE8 never would have been the bastion of standards compliance that it (debatably) currently is. We would still be dealing with the same kind of authoritarian "We're the biggest browser so just make your website compatible to us" attitude that formed the behemoth known as IE6.
I think the point of Open Source Software isn't that it should act as a full-on replacement for commercial software. But at least they can set the standard - comply to this level of quality, or your business model is going to fail, because ours is essentially free and if it's better nobody is going to want your product.
So I got it installed and tried it out, nothing strenuous at all. I was glad to see adblock plus available for it.
However the next time I started it, it "upgraded" itself to 3.6.6. Anyone else have this happen too?
Funny, I didn't mean to be "trolling" . My original comment went from +3 Insightful to Troll! Yikes, sorry to say something negative about Slashdot's pet project! I will know better next time.
Here is what SRWare says. http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
It appears hardware accelerated rendering is disabled by default. To enable, navigate to about:config, set the following setting to true. gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled
Quite a bit of work on memory usage and fragmentation was done for Firefox 3. See this blog. Personally I have no problem with stability or memory usage.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
The Chrome team watches pretty carefully for performance regressions, see http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/perf/dashboard/overview.html The buildbot will go red if there's a big one, and people watch the graphs for creeping regressions.
Firefox developers know that their product will be used on Windows; they promote such usage. Through their collection of crash reporter data over several years and versions, they have reason to know about the common ways in which Windows fails when used in conjunction with Firefox. Not defending against such classes of failures (with code, documentation, education, or other means) when Mozilla knows and want their software to be used in conjunction with known and common failure modes is at least irresponsible on the personal part of each contributor, if not outright unprofessional of the developers and the organization.
The cleaning agent companies figured this out long ago, and responsibly advertise "do not mix X with Y" since they know the combination is harmful. Going back to 3.6 (if not much earlier), Mozilla knows that mixing Firefox, Skype, and Windows causes badness.
Even in the unlikely event that Skype and Microsoft are both completely uncooperative, a responsible thing to do would be to advertise "do not mix Firefox, Skype, and Windows under such and such circumstances" since Mozilla can anticipate the failure of their own product, and the negative impression of Firefox that such failure should leave upon the user.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I've had it crash on Debian and Ubuntu, but that's usually Flash's fault or nspluginwrapper, the most evil piece of software ever invented.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
- So what is it? A beta, or a release candidate?
- Let's call it Beta-candidate
Personally I started having stability issues with Firefox 3 (it hardly ever crashed on me before). I guess you don't have your Firefox open for weeks (and yes, several crashes have been in the night or over weekend when I wasn't touching it for quite some time, and without any active plugin content).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
For what it's worth, I can confirm the logs that evmar posted. They begin at September 17, 2008, 3:00:30 PM EST in my logs for #chromium-dev on freenode. I idled in that channel since shortly after the Chromium release was announced. I'm not a Google employee or Chrome/Chromium developer, but I have used Chrome as my browser for over a year (IIRC).
Salient quotes from the log:
Iron is a complete scam, avoid it. If you're worried about privacy, use Chromium compiled by your distro (don't want MS or Apple to get info about you, right?) and turn off everything that sends data to Google.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
The worst type of bug reports are along the lines of: ...) ...)?)
1/ it does not work (what does not work? what steps did you do? what are you expecting to happen? what operating system are you running on?
2/ it crashes
3/ it is leaking memory (what usage pattern? what were you doing? what site(s)/image/document/... were you viewing/printing/...? what is your system like (graphics card, amount of memory,
The more details people can provide to the developers of any application, the better they can investigate and track down the issue(s).
The worst types of bug are the ones where:
1/ they only happen when the planets are aligned correctly (i.e. very infrequently)
2/ they happen due to interaction between two threads
3/ they don't/do happen when you turn on diagnostics/tracing
4/ they don't happen when you debug the application
Having a clear, repeatable test case (doing X then Y then Z will always trigger the issue) makes it easier to track down. The bugs that are hard to reproduce and track down take the longest to fix and may require very specific domain knowledge of the operating system, APIs being used, programming language and the actual codebase.
They did fix the memory leaks. I have seen test after test that shows that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers. If you think you see a memory leak, explain how we could all see the problem. Then we can file a bug report and the problem can be fixed.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I don't have any issue with stability or memory either. I was getting some crashing but it stopped when I changed network cards.
It's a bit of a long story but I noticed that Media Player Classic would crash when playing WMV videos over the network and it seem to happen more often when an RDP session was open. Much fiddling around later and I eventually got an Intel PCI-E gigabit ethernet card to replace the crappy on-board nVidia LAN I was using previously. After that it stopped crashing and so did Firefox.
Well, saying that, I do get the odd crash when opening Firefox as it tries to restore my tabs. Open it a second time and it's fine. Sometimes it forgets the open tabs too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And how many people have actually found memory leaks? How many people just think they're the victim of a memory leak, and actually don't understand what Firefox (or its plugins) are doing? How do you even know that they specifically aren't fixing memory leaks?
Seriously, your whole post is just badly thought out.
It nearly never crashes for me, but after an hour it tends to use 25-99% of CPU. At the moment I have 4 tabs open and it is using nearly 500MB. Firefox 3.5.9 on Kubuntu Karmic. I have to "killall firefox" before trying to us another application, which isn't so bad as the session restore feature brings me instantly back to where I was. I prefer it overall to Chrome except for playing Flash videos, where Chrome plays back smoothly but Firefox judders to a halt.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Ahem. I mostly use Firefox but there is a Flashblock for Chrome. In fact, there are at least 2. The new version of AdBlock Plus for Chrome really blocks most of the adverts, not just hides them. There are also versions of Adblock Plus and FlashBlock for Opera. I'm pretty sure there's also FlashBlock for IE. tl;dr: There are working versions of FlashBlock and AdBlock Plus for all the major browsers.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Mozilla is working on MSI packages for Firefox. If you have 1337 hax0r skills, try dropping by mozilla.bugzilla and help them.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
This comparison completely glosses over the client ID removal, which is the main reason most people are interested in Iron. The comparison apparently considers "The Client ID of the browser is wiped out" a 'minor tweak'. It's major to some of us.
Again with the SRWare Iron hate? Does Iron deliver what it promises to deliver? Resounding yes. Is Iron code different from Chrome? Yes, only a few lines, but that was the deal: A Chrome mod stripped from the questionable parts. I read the logs and the history of Iron and I don't see the big scam. The guy created a product that works as advertised and, due to Germany's anti-Google stance, people there are more likely to go for a de-Googlefied Chrome, therefore _sometimes_ visiting SRWare's website to download it, maybe generating some bucks via adSense or by using some of the other products SRware offers. He was mainly after the good publicity –The guy who stripped Chrome from the bad parts. He got it. He delivered a product that works as promised. Where's the scam? Loads of money? Pics or it didn't happen. Malware. No. Spyware. No. Iron's code is free to download and examine by anyone with the skills to do so. Seriously, you guys presenting the IRC logs as evidence that Iron is a money-making scam should read them again. The fellow/s behind Iron created a Chromium mod that works just as advertised. The creators of ChromePlus did the same with their Chromium mod; the creator of PaleMoon and CometBird did the same with their Firefox mods. Iron's home page is full of nasty ads... Use an adblocker or download Chromium elsewhere. tl;dr: Iron works as advertised. No scam.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
To avoid Google-tracking you can try Chromium, SRWare Iron and ChromePlus.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Those are just the crashes in the latest version, that was released a few days ago. Most people don't update immediately, I suppose.
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
Finally, somebody who not just posts FUD but actually investigates. After reading parent's article though, I get the feeling that Iron does actually do exactly what it claims to do: improve the user's privacy by changing default settings that 99% of Chrome users never even heard about, let alone change them to appropriate values. Specifically the changes mentioned are:
privacy related:
- disables the Google suggestion service (which informs Google about what you're typing into the search bar before you trigger the search)
- disables a service called GoogleURLTracker (which informs Google about your location, so it can "localise" you)
- Chromium's built-in statistics recording and reporting functionality is shut off
- the Client ID of the browser is wiped out
- disables Google's alternate error pages (that invokes another Google service, that isn't really required for web browsing)
- disables a web resource service used to fetch new help tips for Chromium (another service that "phones home" is disabled)
other:
- changes the Chromium version number from 5.0.306 to 4.0.280 (Iron version number)
- number of thumbnails in the New Tab page is increased from 8 to 12
- number of days of history used to compile that data is increased from 90 to 180
- Chromium tips that are shown on the New Tab page to help users learn how to use Chromium are disabled
- dialog that Chromium shows new users when it is first run is disabled
To recap, this article headlines "Is Iron a Scam? Yes" actually lists Iron's diffs from the Chromium project (which btw is only the codebase for Chrome, which itself is not open source, thus we have no way to ascertain what the Chrome browser is actually doing in the background). These diffs contains modifications that ensure that most of the default behaviours of Chromium that "phone home" are disabled and can not be enabled through the options menu.
So no matter what kind of douchebags the developer(s) may be, they are actually delivering on what they promise - a browser that disables phoning home features. Again: these features can be disabled through Chromium's options menu, but most people won't because they don't know about them.
Furthermore they are doing this while also releasing their source code for everyone to see (and compile) so we not only see what changes they make to the privacy settings, but can also make sure they are not adding questionable features themselves. In any case, if you wanted to fork your own personalised "privacy enabled" browser from the Chromium project it looks as if forking from the Iron source will save you some work.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I answered this questions a few days ago in a different thread, but again: 1st part: _Most_ of the preferences Iron changes can be disabled in _Chromium_ . Keywords: Most, Chromium. How many non-nerds are using Chromium? Is Chromium easily obtainable for non-nerds? Are _all_ the preferences Iron changes easily disabled in Chromium? Are _all_ the preferences easily disabled in _Chrome_? Regarding the delayed schedule... You are comparing oranges and nectarines, let's say. Iron is based on stable Chromium releases, like Chrome and ChromePlus. Iron is on the Chrome and ChromePlus league, not on the Chromium league. It's based on Chromium because it has to, just like ChromePlus. 2nd part: Soooooo... PaleMoon, CometBird, ChromePlus, etc. are also pretentious and preying on different fears people have regarding the original browsers they are derived from? They don't change much code, but they change the name. They deserve hate as well, I guess. Yes, Iron changes only a few lines. So what? The guy pulled a "great" ROI with almost no effort. He provides a Chrome alternative that works as advertised, and that massively pisses-off 4 slashdotters. It's always the same story "he only changed a few lines in Chromium". Duh! That's the whole premise of Iron. Perhaps there would be less noise if he called it Chromium+ or Chromium For The Masses.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
It's both possible and practical to centrally configure Firefox in a very extensive fashion through Group Policies (or even brute force script-based replication of the various Firefox prefs config files), making simplified network-wide rollout and management a real option in medium and large environments. This is not possible with Chrome or Chromium, and doesn't look like it will be any time in the near future. Also, Adblock with element hiding, combined with Flashblock on terminal server setups is a major selling point for smaller organizations (where a proxy setup to do the same thing may not be in the cards cost-wise).
The ability to add multiple rows of tabs in Firefox is a major usability advantage over Chrome for power users. The new UI looks like it may remove this ability (which is, granted, only conferred through plugins in current Firefox builds, but at least it's possible.) Don't tell me about "Firefox is bloated derp" so can't handle too many tabs anyway, I don't know what the hell people are doing with their browsers that makes their FireFox eat up these astronomical memory amounts of 800-1000mb I keep hearing about. Put down the crack^H^H^H^H^HFarmVille pipe and get a life, perhaps? Although some people are disorganized idiots who seem to think tabs are bookmarks and have 100 of them open, I have seen many cases where regular users run 20-40 tabs in FireFox 3.6, under Windows XP, and never see memory usage for the process exceed 350-400mb at *worst*, with ~200-250mb about average. There's a FUDge factory out there somewhere working 3 shifts 7 days a week pumping out a lot of utterly unwarranted bad press for FireFox.
Practically zero issues (other than the unavoidable ActiveX conflicts that are resolved using an IETab of some sort, Chrome does no better here), even with multiple plugins running, lots of in-tab PDF manipulation, and users who are not especially computer savvy and thus do not know what is safe or unsafe to do to a browser. None of this "FireFox is unstable" horseshit. Not once in the past 6 months have I ever had to kill a FireFox instance because it froze or crashed uncontrollably (users don't have access to task manager) Seriously, people are doing something blatantly wrong or just making this crap up because of one bad FireFox experience they had 2 or 3 years ago. Or maybe FireFox just runs like crap on Linux? Oh, the delicious irony.
oh, never mind.
just look for Frontmotion Firefox Community edition.
MSI installer with update overlays? Check.
ADMs pre-built to create GPOs that control almost everything in prefs.js? Check.
Packaging tool to push pre-installed and configured prefs and addons for both? Check (ok, last one costs $200/year but is unlimited in # of seats. Totally worth the cost for updating an organization with more than 10-15 PCs).
Why are they calling it 4.0 and not 3.7 as it should be? Don't give in to publicity stuns Mozilla, you're better than that.
I am a heavy tab user too. Opera handles 100s of tabs better than firefox IMHO. The most I had in Opera was 412.
In Firefox I tend to hover between 80-150
When you have Tree Style Tabs, having hundreds of tabs is easier than you think to manage.
It means I multitask a lot which may be ineffective. I just dislike abandoning a resource or website I was reading to quickly do something else.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Debian adds their own patches to make software more stable. Doesn't really count.
The patches in Iceweasel are:
So, some is branding, other little fixes, not really about performance, and the rest are changes to the Makefile. There's no "fix all crashes" patch in any way.
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I'll be sticking with FireFox not only for it's web development addons, but because, of all things, Chrome has no addon (let alone inbuilt) support for Google Bookmarks (just a standard bookmarking hack which doesn't give even close to the same functionality), which continues to baffle me. And as I use many different computers all over the place (home, work, mobile), having my bookmarks go with me is essential.
When I can get my google bookmarks working properly in Chrome, I'll use it by default, and switch to FireFox for web development. Until then, I only use chrome if I want to quickly go to youtube to watch a video, or something.
There's also dozens of issues I have with little UI things like how Chrome highlights the current tab, etc, which are no doubt personal preferences of mine.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Quote: "I've been using Firefox for a really long time, and the only instabilities I've ever witnessed were caused by Flash. Aside from that, I honestly have no remembrance in my head of Firefox crashing."
Paraphrase: I knew someone who smoked a lot who got cancer. Cancer has not been a problem for me, so I don't think cancer is a problem.