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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.
Yeah, and no changelog links. Nothing there but second hand speed ratings for javascript. WTF slashdot??? Here is the closest thing I can find to a changelog: roadmap.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups
That's not the link to released betas. This is:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
You'll notice FF4 isn't there. That's because the article has jumped the gun and is pointing you at a nightly instead, almost certainly not what you want.
As the weekly status meeting minutes say, the beta is coming soon and what is there right now is the nightly, for developers.
More importantly is it gonna finally fix the memory leak issue?
Tell me about it. Do you how annoying it is to walk into the office and see memory dribbling out of the computer because of the browser?! I hate it! And my IT support company: PHB IT Services says that memory leaks are actually an OSHA violation and if someone slips on that memory, I could be sued for MILLIONS! So I pay them to come in a clean up all that memory leaking.
That's my management secret: hire only the best!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
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 didn't RTFA, but if the summary is correct, is this not what most of the firefox critics have all been clamoring for?
A smoother and more reliable firefox without a boatload of shiny new features?
This link does say FF4 Beta 1 Candidates, so it might be it.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/4.0b1-candidates/build1/win32/en-US/
This space for rent.
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?
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
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.
Do you open flash heavy sites? or sites with video inside? big sites ? For me, all it takes is one site with flash, to take down firefox. I am using Fedora 13 64-Bit. However I do agree that the possible origin of this is flash and not firefox, because normal sites with little or no flash leave firefox stable.
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.
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems?
Porn. Vast amounts of porn.
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.
But I always run flashblock yet do allow Flash on certain sites like youtube.
So you might be right, Flash is still the main cause of browser instability.
Yet I thought the idea behind this 'Chromified' is to have tabs and processes run independently and thus a single bad page/tab should not take down the whole application.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
So enjoy Chrome. Not everyone needs to love Firefox.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
While it slowly builds up to 800MB of RAM used, even though you've closed every tab except for one...
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?
Actually, I check to see if there's a recall at the NTSB or mycarfacts.com and some other sites to see if I can get fixed for free.
But wait, we're talking about software - an industry where standard procedure is to release shit and have the customer find all the bugs and faults that testing didn't.
And I have a Toyota you insensitive clod!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"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.
look here is the deal:
flash is fine.
lets just leave the "proprietary" part aside for the moment.
the reason why "flash sucks" is because the developers cant be asked to optimize their code for memory leaks.
saying "flash sucks" because it makes your browser crash is like saying "c++ sux" because the developer forgot to delete a pointer causing a memory leak to crash yer box. you would never say "c++ sux!". in fact, you might even say the opposite, that it would "blow yer leg off if yer not careful...". i think the same consideration applies to AS3/Flex framework.
optimize your code. profile the flash app. and watch how yer flash experience improves. it really will be stable.
i promise. scout's honor.
if you want a better flash experience than you need to go to the source of the issue: inadvertant memory leaks caused by badly written poorly optimized code that was never, ever profiled.
the problem, however, also lies with Adobe. they continue to market Flash to "designers" who cant program their way out of a paper bag, instead of "developers" who might know a thing or two. and they continue to confuse the issue by having a timeline-based Flash creation tool in addition to their Enterpise-level toolchain that allows "designers" to add hack upon hack upon hack.
this is why "flash sux".
-0.
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
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).
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 $100 million in assets could stop other work and address the instabilities.
Much more could be written, but that's enough for now.
Boy, I wish I could mod this up. Iron is definitely a scam. (I was in the chromium irc channel when its developer came on the scene, and he openly admitted he was just playing on people's fears. It seems his goal is to make money with google ads on the download page.) Disclaimer: I used to work on Chromium at Google, now I'm just a happy user.
At least with verion 3.6.4 you can go to Edit -> Prefferences -> Advanced -> Network and specify the limit of what Firefox may cache.
That's the disk cache, not the memory cache.
Also, the numbers reported by Firefox as "used memory cache" are about 10% of the total memory used on my system. So, Firefox claims that only 80MB are used for memory cache, while Windows reports that 800MB is being used by the firefox.exe process.
I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows
Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong.
30-40 tabs? Fine, whatever. *300-400*? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? How the hell can you even manage to *find* the tabs you need? What, did you never learn about that fancy feature called "bookmarks"?
If you want something fixed, you need to show how it negatively impacts FARMVILLE. That @#@$@% application is driving everything now.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
most of those set to ADD and OCD forums, I'll warrant.
Bookmarks require you to reload the page, and are just a list anyway, with limitations on linking to specific locations on a page. Remembering where a few hundred tabs are is pretty easy (remember a few key tabs, remember the others in relation to those key tabs, judicious use of the crtl+tab(+shift) shortcuts), far easier than trying to wrangle any of the various 'content organiser' programs I've tried into a useful tool. The organisation software installed in my own brain still beats any I've installed on my computer thus far.
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!
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
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
Because it has not been released, if it was it would be where all the other betas are. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ There would be an announcement to https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/announce-prerelease . There would be download links at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html What they are linking to is a possible build of Firefox 4 beta 1.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
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.
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).
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
Have you tried Read It Later? Seems like that might fit your browsing model.
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
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'.
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
"Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong."
No need to be so intolerant towards different customs or beliefs!
It's not as if he's using emacs, after all...
Karma? What's that again?
Seriously. Complaining about Firefox instability when running hundreds of tabs simultaneously is like eating 10 burgers a day from McDonalds every day for a month and then complaining about how McDonalds is unhealthy when you gain a bunch of weight and suffer a heart attack.
Probably a bad analogy because McD's is rather unhealthy, but I'm sure you get the point.
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.
Yes, but you obviously don't check the memory usage as he does, I have used many tabs and left firefox open for days on end as well, and have noticed taskmanager slowly climbing while FF is open, showing no signs of stopping, so I do what I need and sometimes just force close and restores sessions to get back some memory, but for his problem where users/clients might be using it for office documents (openoffice.org) as excel spreadsheets or what not, it might be a disaster waiting to happen...
I am very happy with FF, but sometimes wonder if my copy i downloaded might have been MiM attacked
and swapped with a diff. version, I have 8 computers in all at home and all run diff. version each of FF (too lazy to upgrade all of them)....so I see the memory leaks....although one version (forget which) had been stabilized maybe 3.1...and then the whole started again with the newer version.
my fault for not keeping up to date, but I understood his point above
Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a problem affecting most of them, at least on the same platform and such. It's just a question of how rarely the circumstances of the crash appear and if it's specific to exactly what you're doing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel...total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue-severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally...you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it."
-Hunter S Thompson
;)
Nah. It's been working out for me so far.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
about:memory in chrome is handy for comparing memory usage between browsers you have open. No calculation needed!