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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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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"?
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".
most of those set to ADD and OCD forums, I'll warrant.
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!
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.
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?
"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.