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Firefox 4.0 Beta Candidate Available

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the beta-burning-fox dept.

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.

18 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Screenshot/Mockups by vivek7006 · · Score: 4, Informative

    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups

    1. Re:Screenshot/Mockups by recoiledsnake · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re:Screenshot/Mockups by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  2. Re:Download Link by Bazzargh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:more importantly by AnonymousClown · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  4. Re:Didn't recognize exactly how slow Firefox is..w by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Download Link by recoiledsnake · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  6. Re:more importantly by Pojut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  7. Re:more importantly by eln · · Score: 4, Funny

    What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems?

    Porn. Vast amounts of porn.

  8. Re:more importantly by bunratty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  9. Re:Didn't recognize exactly how slow Firefox is..w by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.

  10. Re:Didn't recognize exactly how slow Firefox is..w by dkegel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:more importantly by Abcd1234 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"?

  12. Re:more importantly by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 4, Funny

    I typically have 300-400+ tabs open in multiple windows...

    most of those set to ADD and OCD forums, I'll warrant.

  13. Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 Beta yet by asa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  14. Re:more importantly by geschild · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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?
  15. Re:more importantly by Hatta · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nah. It's been working out for me so far.

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    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  16. Re:more importantly by Abcd1234 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.