Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released a new beta of Firefox 4 this morning. Originally intended as a quick update for the feature-complete Beta 7 release, the new Beta includes 1415 bugfixes, a fine-tuned add-ons manager, improved WebGL support as well as URL bar enhancements."

Comments

How Many Beta's?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll catch the 26th Beta before the final release.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am not mistaken firefox(maybe 3.5) Went to beta 8 as well. Before releasing the final version. Nothing wrong with that. Just different philosophy how when and how to release.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[perryizgr8]

i seriously need them to release ff4. enough beta-ing around already!!1

Re:How Many Beta's?

[BatGnat]

i seriously need them to release ff4. enough beta-ing around already!!1

So you would rather have buggy code as long as that it is released? use IE!

Roll a d20, save VS Stupidity......

Re:How Many Beta's?

[Soul-Burn666]

Firefox 4 goes up to 11!

Re:How Many Beta's?

[mcgrew]

I think I'll wait intil it's less buggy. This one has 1415 bug fixes, how many more bugs are there?

Re:How Many Beta's?

[icebike]

I think I'll wait intil it's less buggy. This one has 1415 bug fixes, how many more bugs are there?

There are 1415 less than there are in the version you are running.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll wait intil it's less buggy. This one has 1415 bug fixes, how many more bugs are there?

It's open source. You tell me.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[hairyfeet]

But are they FINALLY gonna support protected mode in Windows Vista and 7? The tech has been out there since 07 for the love of Pete, and it kinda kills the entire point of having all the extra security of Windows Vista and Win 7 if FF is gonna punch a giant hole right through the security and do a little monkey dance.

So while I hope that Mozilla supports protected mode so I can keep recommending it, until then for myself and my customers I've been testing the Comodo Dragon browser which like all Chromium browsers DOES support protected mode, and adds some extra security features and turns off the Google phoning home like in Chrome. It is taking a little to get used to but so far I have found most of my extensions, and the secure DNS and other security features are nice and it is still fast as hell.

I would really hate to give up on FF, but with the browser being the #1 source of malware getting into a system not supporting protected mode is just too risky. I mean what is the point of all the extra security features if Mozilla doesn't use them? It isn't like FF runs as root in Linux, so why should it run at a higher user level in Windows when it doesn't have to?

Re:How Many Beta's?

[perryizgr8]

okay, but they should have a schedule. right now, they're just coding and coding without even having a tentative release date. 2011 is not a release date.
also, since they've delayed ff4 for perhaps a year now, they should hurry and fix the remaining bugs in later patches.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[perryizgr8]

i bet all of those 1415 bugs are just minor issues that won't hurt anyone. the benefit to coming out of beta is that extensions will start supporting ff4, which many of them do not right now.
also, they've been delaying release for a long time. the new features ff4 has over the current stable version are:
1. ui-which i can already get through a theme.
2. JägerMonkey engine- which has already been beaten by the current stable version of chrome, and which is closely followed by the current beta of ie9.
3. Direct2D acceleration- ie9 beta's been doing that since forever.

now i understand that ff4 beta also has these features, but that leads us to the conclusion that ff4 development has slowed down enough to match the glacial pace of microsoft.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[metrix007]

Again,, I have to point not making use of WIC does not punch a hole in the security. Yes, it is better and more secure if it uses them, but you are not more insecure by not using them...if that makes sense.

Honestly relying on something like Comodo secure DNS is not a great solution for your clients..what happens when that company goes or starts charging for the service?

Re:How Many Beta's?

[after.fallout.34t98e]

Actually (I have been running minefield since beta4):
* several of them at least were actual full browser crashes
* others were partial crashes (eg youtube stopped working for a few days in there because the flash plugin kept crashing)
* odd bugs like the addon bar disappearing (and without it there was no way to get to some extensions)
* bad UX in the panorama functionality (you could close panorama and lose all of the tabs you had open)
* app tabs were (and might still be, I haven't verified it yet) loading the page that they saw out of cache instead of online (resulting in when /. is an app tab me seeing the stories from weeks ago every time the browser is restarted)

On your "points":
@1: while this is true, the new ui is more consistent from a themer's perspective and so this is easier to do

@2: Bull. The JM engine (JM+TM actually) is only currently beaten by the last few revisions of the v8 engine trunk repository, and only in the v8-bench tests (which feature very repeated tests that are benefited most by the v8 optimization set, which progressively further optimizes as lines of code are repeated): http://www.arewefastyet.com/awfy2.php; the IE9 beta engine doesn't actually appear to be any faster than the IE8 engine, but it does have some new dead code matching algorithms so that it seems faster on the benchmarks (that is to say it looks much faster on sunspider because a lot of that code never even gets run due to it being recognized as dead code, but on a site with heavy js usage the changes are insignificant).

@3: Perhaps I don't understand what is so great here. Could someone enlighten me as to why we should care (as users and as web developers) about what particular windows specific hardware acceleration tech is being used?

Actual new features that matter IMO in ff4:
1. JM engine
2. css border radius (proper support in all browsers will affect page sizes on a significant part of the internet)
3. css background image options (background-clip, background-origin, background-size)
4. css calc() function
5. html5 form elements
6. session history management (history.pushState, ...)
7. indexedDb
8. shipping sync with ff4
9. multitouch api
10. HSTS
11. JS typed arrays
12. considerable refactoring and deprecated code removal from Gecko (which will allow future development to happen faster)

While this beta is indeed far better than the last one, there still are some problems that need to be ironed out before it is ready for everyone. It still has some teething issues in the UI that take some getting used to (the status bar is gone, hyperlinks show the new url in the awesomebar, the context menu items for open in new tab and open in new window have swapped, etc.). I believe some of these are still changing. There are still 180+ bugs targeting ff4 and the underlying gecko 2.0 infrastructure (note ff4 is using a major upgrade of the underlying engine which it hasn't done a major upgrade since before ff1):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&target_milestone=Firefox%204.0b9&target_milestone=Firefox%204.0&target_milestone=mozilla2.0b9&target_milestone=mozilla2.0&product=Core&product=Firefox

Re:How Many Beta's?

[mcgrew]

I was under the impression that the 1415 bugs were new bugs in the new version?

Re:How Many Beta's?

[perryizgr8]

Actually (I have been running minefield since beta4):
* several of them at least were actual full browser crashes
* others were partial crashes (eg youtube stopped working for a few days in there because the flash plugin kept crashing)
* odd bugs like the addon bar disappearing (and without it there was no way to get to some extensions)
* bad UX in the panorama functionality (you could close panorama and lose all of the tabs you had open)
* app tabs were (and might still be, I haven't verified it yet) loading the page that they saw out of cache instead of online (resulting in when /. is an app tab me seeing the stories from weeks ago every time the browser is restarted)

agreed. these are serious bugs. although it is surprising that so many crash bugs have been fixed only in the 8th beta, but okay.

@2: Bull. The JM engine (JM+TM actually) is only currently beaten by the last few revisions of the v8 engine trunk repository, and only in the v8-bench tests (which feature very repeated tests that are benefited most by the v8 optimization set, which progressively further optimizes as lines of code are repeated): http://www.arewefastyet.com/awfy2.php [arewefastyet.com]; the IE9 beta engine doesn't actually appear to be any faster than the IE8 engine, but it does have some new dead code matching algorithms so that it seems faster on the benchmarks (that is to say it looks much faster on sunspider because a lot of that code never even gets run due to it being recognized as dead code, but on a site with heavy js usage the changes are insignificant).

you are saying that sunspider test results are bull. that's a new one, because i thought everyone considered that to be a real test of js performance. the whole reason why chrome is considered to be fast is that it scores way ahead on sunspider and sunspider-like tests. i find firefox 3.6 to have the same load times as chrome on almost every page. and then there are some pages (like slashdot discussions with >1000 comments) that load and scroll much faster on firefox 3.6 than chrome. so, if you disregard sunspider scores then you can't compare js performance objectively at all.

@3: Perhaps I don't understand what is so great here. Could someone enlighten me as to why we should care (as users and as web developers) about what particular windows specific hardware acceleration tech is being used?

its important because windows users are the people firefox owes its success to. the only way for firefox to continue its success is to keep its userbase happy, to provide them with a browser that better utilizes their hardware. in fact i think that mozilla knows this. that is why they've let firefox on linux stagnate. imo on linux, chromium is clearly miles ahead of firefox. on windows, firefox continues to be the browser of choice for me.

Actual new features that matter IMO in ff4:
.
.
.
multitouch api
.
. .

multi-touch apis exist only on windows 7. so firefox supports multi-touch only on windows 7. when you acted all arrogant about direct2d support saying you don't care about windows specific improvements, how could you point out to me a feature that is even more hardware and software specific? that stinks of double standards and just a compulsive need to defend firefox without thinking about the matter.
i use firefox as my main and only browser, even on linux where i find it bloated and slow compared to other options. but i have the ability to identify major shortcomings in the development of ff4, without fanboyism clouding my judgment.

Re:How Many Beta's?

[BatGnat]

okay, but they should have a schedule.

They have a schedule! And they had a setback which delayed everything.

since they've delayed ff4 for perhaps a year now

Considering the alphas came out in June, and the 1st beta in July it is hardly a year!
How about you stop making shit up!

Roll a D20, save vs. Stupidity,...again! (you failed the last one)

Re:How Many Beta's?

[hairyfeet]

Explain please. If I have an app with A-d permissions, and a second app with only A, how is giving the attacker a MUCH larger attack vector not punching a hole in your security? I mean if FireFox would have insisted on Root in Linux, would anyone have used it? No, because it would have been stupid and an unnecessary risk. So please explain, how is presenting a larger area of attack to the world with the one piece of software most likely to be exposed to malware not equally dumb? You would have a point if ALL browsers offered an equal sized target, but they don't. Chrome, IE, Dragon, SWIron, Chromium, Safari, ALL of these allow for protected mode browsing. And I'm sure that if asked MSFT would be more than happy to help FF to implement this, just as they added X.264 support, so they can't even claim lack of funds.

As for Comodo? It isn't like this is some new startup here. We are talking about a company with offices in over a half dozen countries and something like 15,000 employees at last count. And why would they charge for it? They are making money hand over fist with their enterprise offerings and the good will they generate with products like Comodo DNS, Comodo Dragon Browser, and Comodo Internet Security being free for home and small business helps to get their name out. And it helps to generate them revenue, as I've personally watched as customers that enjoyed the ease of use and security of the Comodo products at home turned around and sold their bosses on the enterprise solutions. BTW not an employee, just someone who has had nothing but good experiences from their products.

But even if they were to magically go tits up tomorrow it isn't like it would take more than 2 minutes to switch DNS providers. And until then just like protected mode it simply makes good sense. After all, why increase risk and make yourself a larger target to attack if you don't have to? Simply saying "it isn't more dangerous" without any reasoning to back that up is simply opinion. I have given you MY reasons, because protected mode lowers the permissions and helps to isolate the browser from the rest of the system, thus lowering risk. So how is increasing risk "better" in this case?

Re:How Many Beta's?

[after.fallout.34t98e]

agreed. these are serious bugs. although it is surprising that so many crash bugs have been fixed only in the 8th beta, but okay.

Beta 7 is basically where JM landed for the beta. I have a feeling that this was a significant part of the actual bugfixes that have happened.

you are saying that sunspider test results are bull. that's a new one, because i thought everyone considered that to be a real test of js performance.

no I am saying find me a reference that says the stable version of chrome is beating beta8 or a comparable nightly release in terms of performance. The DEV build is certainly faster, but the stable build (8.0.552.224)?

the whole reason why chrome is considered to be fast is that it scores way ahead on sunspider and sunspider-like tests. i find firefox 3.6 to have the same load times as chrome on almost every page. and then there are some pages (like slashdot discussions with >1000 comments) that load and scroll much faster on firefox 3.6 than chrome. so, if you disregard sunspider scores then you can't compare js performance objectively at all.

Again I am not disregarding sunspider scores. In fact I linked you to the mozilla site which is testing 10 tip builds a day for 3 compile options of Firefox and a built from source version of the chrome engine using the latest source for that. Very clearly in the sunspider chart there, the version of Firefox's javascript engine which will be in the official release is beating the absolute newest publicly available version of the v8 engine used in chrome by 9.4 milliseconds. On the kraken benchmark (sunspider was built by apple, kraken was built by mozilla, v8-bench was built by google), ff4 is over 9 seconds faster. The v8-bench test is favoring google but it is the only one I have seen.

The only question I have is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Will the next version of Firefox (whatever version it may be) be slower? Because quite frankly, FF has become a giant turd in that respect, so much so that, although I love it, I'm considering alternatives on my lower-end machines...

Re:The only question I have is

[Wordplay]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html

That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.

Re:The only question I have is

[The MAZZTer]

It is a lot faster. But don't take my word for it, try it out. You might want to use the Profile Manager (google for the launch option) to make a second profile so it doesn't try to convert your existing profile over to new formats and such.

Re:The only question I have is

[trrichard]

It is in fact faster or as fast as chrome in version 4 from a javascript perspective, and it has always run on less ram. So it should be much snappier now.

Re:The only question I have is

[QRDeNameland]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html

That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.

Funny, I initially misread the article title as "Firefox 4 Beat 8 Up", which could be true if that trend line continued for the past two months. ("8" meaning Chrome v8.) Browser deathmatch!!

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more to a browser than rendering and Javascript performance. Firefox has become a hard disk hog. It almost continually writes to disk, which can be very slow, for example on netbooks with first generation SSDs or when you keep your profile on a USB stick (portable Firefox). Worst of all, when it does write to disk, the whole browser locks up. It's barely usable on netbooks for that single reason. You'd think that nothing a browser does could justify writing or reading megabytes of data almost every minute. That's still what happens. (No, extensions or plugins are not involved.)

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

JS isn't the problem. The problem is dumb stuff like not running tabs in separate processes, so loading a single slow tab from, say, a bookmark group locks up the whole browser.

Slashdot is by far the #1 culprit on my system, BTW: since the redesign, it can take an eternity to load a page with lots of comments on it, which is painful if you're looking up a few articles and the corresponding comments off the front page. Ditto for most other social news sites to some extent, though none I use is anything like as bad as here for page load times.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit306]

i would not think that nothing a browser does could justify utilizing storing large amounts of data... because i understand the importance of local caching to minimize network utilization.

Re:The only question I have is

[Sonny Yatsen]

Yeah, I've been using Beta 7 for a while and for whatever odd reason, I've been getting momentary freezes as it's doing routine stuff. Is this happening to anyone else, or just my specific configuration?

Re:The only question I have is

[augustm]

It has been a turd since this summer, mostly due to the bug in the SQL code which
killed interactive performance. It was repaired this week and should make beta9. It
is also in recent 3.6 builds so mainline firefox is almost unbearable.

Meaningless javascript benchmarks are not very useful for this sort of bug- which
gives 10 second hangs when working with history or bookmarks.

Bug number 595530

Re:The only question I have is

[couchslug]

Given the burden of the many ad-ons I run, I'm not sure which is fucking up, the browser or the add-ons.

One nice thing about running 8GB RAM on a 32-bit system with PAE enabled is that when FF gobbles memory it maxes out at 4GB!

I'll keep it for the add-ons. RAM is cheap.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, forgot to mention, I disable caching to disk, so that's not it.

Re:The only question I have is

[Monkeedude1212]

It is in fact faster or as fast as chrome in version 4 from a javascript perspective, and it has always run on less ram. So it should be much snappier now.

I Beg to Differ
My desktop

There is a reason people have been calling FF bloated lately. This is without any addons, plugins (besides maybe Java), or themes or any crap built into FF. This is a fresh install.

Sure, FF may be working on good Javascripting engines, I haven't looked at the benchmarks recently, but the claim "It runs on Less Ram" died a long time ago.

Re:The only question I have is

[damien_kane]

The simplest solution is to turn of hdd-caching, but a more in-depth solution is to actually setup a RAMdrive and point your FFCache, IECache, and Windows Temp directories at that.

Unfortunately setting up a ramdrive is above the general public's scope of ability.

Re:The only question I have is

[GameboyRMH]

My experience with Firefox 4 beta says no! I've been running it on my laptop for a few weeks and it's far faster AND more stable than 3.6

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit309]

oh, forgot to ask, do you disable your OS from paging memory to disk?

Re:The only question I have is

[0123456]

There's more to a browser than rendering and Javascript performance. Firefox has become a hard disk hog. It almost continually writes to disk, which can be very slow

Isn't that because they moved to using sqlite to store bookmarks because NTFS used to eat your entire bookmarks file if Windows crashed? Whereas sqlite syncs multiple times every time you update the database?

Re:The only question I have is

[vlm]

There is a reason people have been calling FF bloated lately. This is without any addons, plugins (besides maybe Java), or themes or any crap built into FF.

34.7 megs? I can only run 120 FF processes on my main desktop then. Bummer. Hmm, that would be 12 across and 10 down.

Only things that matters to me are:

Adblock plus
Firefox sync
firebug
flashblock
ghostery
remove-it-permanently
Noscript

once I can get all that cross platform, I'm ready to switch. I'll put up with anything else, as long as those addons work.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't make a difference.

Re:The only question I have is

[amicusNYCL]

Lightweight! I've got Firefox/Firebug open to a single tab (granted, a lot of refreshing and ajaxing) and it has 3:52 of CPU time and is using 206MB of RAM and 202MB of VM. Ha!

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I don't care. All I'm saying is that "we're faster than Chrome" is not the whole truth. I use a browser, not a bare HTML widget. Firefox should simply not need to write so much data to disk and it should write more intelligently.

Re:The only question I have is

[Monkeedude1212]

Oh don't get me wrong, there's plenty of reasons to use Firefox and you've compiled a nice list.

Thing is people are claiming it's this much slimmer streamlined browser, like something really lightweight. If you've got a decent computer you obviously won't have any problems running Firefox as a regular browser.

However, there are people who will set up their Dual Monitors, and they'll want to have Crysis on highest settings on One monitor while a Youtube video plays their favourite song on the other with MSN Live chat open and a wikipedia page tab on some topic or another, meanwhile they are also downloading a game from Steam.

It's in these kinds of setups that I wouldn't recommend firefox to most people because having that nice lightning theme which most 'non-power-users' tend towards is entirely useless and doesn't really provide them with any benefit and then they'll complain when they don't get +30FPS in their game when they try to do all this stuff. It's when you have mutliple processes running and actually maxing out your RAM that you find a nice lightweight browser handy. And there are people who do that. As a developer I find Visual Studio can be resource hoggy at times, oink oink.

Great browser, not dissing Firefox, just arguing the claim that it doesn't use as much Memory as other browsers.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

NTFS is a journaling file system. It is unlikely that a system crash would cause data loss on anything that has already been written to disk.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

I read on Slashdot that the last Chrome release included a new V8 version that's up to twice as fast in some Javascript benchmarks. Would be interesting if they updated the table so we can see the current situation.

Re:The only question I have is

[0123456]

NTFS is a journaling file system. It is unlikely that a system crash would cause data loss on anything that has already been written to disk.

Perhaps you should tell that to the many, many, many people Cc-ed on the infamous 'Windows crashed and ate my bookmarks' Mozilla bug.

And yes, it happened to me several times: any time XP blue-screened with Firefox running I'd find my bookmarks had gone after the reboot.

Re:The only question I have is

[data2]

There are somewhat more recent graphs at arewefastyet.com, although only up to Nov 4th.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

You may wish to re-try this on FF 4. There has been significant work put in to reducing disk access in Firefox:

• Use sqlite's WAL to reduce fsyncs and disk writes
• Write cookie data to disk less frequently
• Fewer files opened on startup
• Fixed the SQLite page size to increase performance on Windows

There is also a tracking bug for bad I/O patterns available, so you can see what they're up to.

Re:The only question I have is

[aeoo]

FF, and especially FF4 are very fast for me on Macbook. As fast as Chrome for all intents and purposes. Of course that's not scientific, but then there do exist some benchmarks and you can look them up yourself.

Re:The only question I have is

[quixote9]

Firefox is not slow, or any of the other BS, for ages now. Get a current version before you make outdated comments. Is Google doing a Microsoft these days, and telling employees to sprinkle PR on forums?

I run Chrome, Safari, Opera, and IE up to 8. (No Win7 to run IE9 on.) At times I run them all on the same websites during web design. IE is the champion dog. No question about that. The rest? In actual use? Indistinguishable.

Except that with Firefox I have Adblock and Noscript, so way less crap. Which means that my brain gets to load the information about ten times faster. Unless you don't use your brain, that's an important factor.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Journaling ensures filesystem consistency it doesn't guarantee against data loss.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

That bug doesn't affect me in any way, so maybe a lot of people haven't had it yet.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the next version of Firefox (whatever version it may be) be slower? Because quite frankly, FF has become a giant turd in that respect, so much so that, although I love it, I'm considering alternatives on my lower-end machines...

Who modded this 'Insightful'? For one thing, it offers no insight - just questions. For another, it presents those questions in a flamebait way.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why doesn't it happen with other browsers? Also, any database Firefox might be using it still going to be sitting on top of NTFS and thus prone to the same problem if it really is the fault of the file system..

Sounds more like a bug in Firefox than one with NTFS.

Re:The only question I have is

[kripkenstein]

There's more to a browser than rendering and Javascript performance. Firefox has become a hard disk hog. It almost continually writes to disk, which can be very slow, for example on netbooks with first generation SSDs or when you keep your profile on a USB stick (portable Firefox).

You can disable the disk cache, that would help in situations where the disk is slow. It's disabled in Mobile Firefox, for example.

Desktop Firefox is tuned for typical desktop/laptop machines, where it makes sense to cache on disk quite a bit. I think you raise a very good point, as netbooks are getting more popular, Firefox should be tuned for them as well.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha! It's funny because you're illiterate!

Re:The only question I have is

[higuita]

so you are comparing the firefox and IE memory usage... dont forget that IE is integrated in the windows, so not everything he uses is inside the IE process...

even in your example, you have only one IE open, but there is 2 of then in the process list (one with 16MB and another with 6MB)

shutdown the IE, check if there is no IE process and open it again... opens very fast right? sure, most of its components where not unloaded, yet you had no IE process, so where is the memory usage of those components?

i'm not saying that FF uses less RAM than IE, but comparing things like this is totally unfair and lying to yourself.

for what i see, i would say that FF uses too much ram every time a picture is loaded... not a leak, but some sort of uncompressed storage for some kinds of images (i suspect animated gif), but might be that the images of today are "huge" compared with the past image size... the other browsers usually also eat lot of ram when loading images (small or big, pictures or graphics)

Re:The only question I have is

[Noughmad]

Slashdot is an offender in terms of page size too. My phone's browser has a kB counter, and a sigle Slashdot story takes (without caching, with ads) almost a megabyte. On my 1Mbit connection this takes several seconds, which is obviously more than any engine would take just rendering it.

Somehow I doubt there are a million letters in the comments.

Re:The only question I have is

[Noughmad]

flashblock
[...]
once I can get all that cross platform, I'm ready to switch.

No need to wait, Linux ships with flashblock by default. Unblocking it, that might be a problem.

Re:The only question I have is

[Monkeedude1212]

comparing things like this is totally unfair and lying to yourself

I closed the IE process. Killed Process tree. Terminated, wasn't listed. Then I opened 1 IE browser, navigated to this article. Then I opened Firefox, navigated to this article.

It may be unfair that Firefox can't get its components built into the operating system - but the fact of the matter remains that IE, it's two processes combined, one likely handling the browser application and the other one handling the tab (You'll notice that opening a new tab creates a new IE Process) - those two combined still didn't add up to Firefox's usage.

It IS using less memory on my system to use IE, even if the OS is hiding some of the memory costs in another process thats constantly running, thats memory thats going to be used regardless if I use IE or FF.

It's not an unfair comparison - it's just a slanted competition.

Re:The only question I have is

[0123456]

Then why doesn't it happen with other browsers?

IE writes to individual files per bookmark, whereas Firefox used to write to one big flat text file which could be several megabytes in size. Chrome presumably learned from Firefox and writes to some kind of database?

Also, any database Firefox might be using it still going to be sitting on top of NTFS and thus prone to the same problem if it really is the fault of the file system.

Sqlite syncs three times every time you update the database, and uses its own journaliing to allow it to recover from corruption.

Sounds more like a bug in Firefox than one with NTFS.

Then why didn't it happen on other file systems? It happened to me often enough that I switched that partition to FAT32 in the end, which could recover from a crash without randomly deleting files.

In the real world it's an interaction between how Firefox was updating its bookmarks file with poor design on Microsoft's part. Firefox would be writing the file numerous times while you were browsing the web, and somehow NTFS would truncate the file to zero bytes if it crashed at the wrong time during that process.

And I'd also add that one time I had NTFS delete a _two gigabyte_ file that I was downloading from the Internet when the power went out. I suspect the problem is somehow related to files which have been created but not closed when the operating system crashes.

Re:The only question I have is

[HaZardman27]

Still waging your little war against ACs?

Re:The only question I have is

[Charliemopps]

And yet if I open Firefox it takes nearly 30 - 45 seconds, while Chrome opens almost instantly. Bragging about its javascript performance is like bragging your new car can do 0-60 in 4 seconds and not mentioning it can only take corners at 10mph. I like Firefox, but it's really become a dog lately.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean that's awful and all, but you really ought to think about how It's just a specific aspect of Firefox that's failing. Not to mention the large number of other apps resident in memory that are not failing as a result of the crash. It's very likely, then, that they were doing something quite wrong.

Re:The only question I have is

[bill_mcgonigle]

the AC is a moron who can't be bothered to read a bug report before mouthing off.

Re:The only question I have is

[BZ]

> And yet if I open Firefox it takes nearly 30 - 45 seconds, while Chrome opens almost
> instantly.

I assume that's with a clean profile (or at least one without extensions) and that you're using the Firefox 4 beta, right?

On Windows Vista/7, there are some existing dwrite issues being worked through where trying to initialize the dwrite library will go and read all the fonts on your operating system in their entirety; issues that are partially fixed if you install the updates IE9 requires and partially being worked around on the Firefox end for Firefox 4; those patches aren't done yet.

Also on Windows it's common for OEMs (and things like Skype!) to install system-wide Firefox extensions that severely impact Firefox performance. That's being worked on too. I sort of assume you checked for this possibility already.

If you're not on Vista or Windows 7, I'd really appreciate you reporting a bug about this to Mozilla and ccing me (put the string ":bz" in the cc field). It should be quite possible to measure what's going on during those 30-45 seconds and figure out why you're seeing slow startup when others aren't. It's pretty late in the game, but we might be able to fix whatever is causing you problems before final!

Re:The only question I have is

[edibobb]

Mozillazine ate my backup button, and I am using Firefox. Those worm brained milk drinking gooberheads stole my lousy backup button!

Re:The only question I have is

[vlueboy]

Wow, that is pretty revealing.

Seeing how flatlined the competitor's scores were throughout, there are questions in light of the GP:

Will this downward trend (300ms sunspider improvement) stop as soon as they're numerically the "slightly better" of their competitors? Is there a genuine effort to, say shave another 300ms so others have to work really hard to best THEM now? Will devs get bored and drop this? The v8bench was a drastic improvement as well, the data shows an asymptote equal to Chrome's static scores.

The slowness workaround for my single core machine is nice-ing FF in Linux and installing the prio freeware for Windows. After a reboot, Windows' task manager could then be used to permanently assign "Above normal" priority to firefox and the flash plugin container. That will slightly starve the OS shell if flash video is playing in Firefox when you're viewing picture folders in XP simultaneously.

Mozilla's devs never cared that the tab switch slowness has been the worst of all browsers since version 2.0

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

NTFS only journals metadata.

Re:The only question I have is

[Celestialwolf]

+1

Re:The only question I have is

[DirePickle]

In my experience, FF4 is far worse than FF3 when loading multiple pages at once (as at startup). If this is due to everything slamming the DB, that's not improved.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anne Honime]

Absolutely. This bug is a real show stopper until it gets really fixed. I was tempted to try ff4ß8, but if that fix is due for ß9, I'm going to wait for a while.

Re:The only question I have is

[vlm]

No need to wait, Linux ships with flashblock by default. Unblocking it, that might be a problem.

apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

To be honest, I've never really seen animated advertisements as "improving" my browsing experience so I usually don't bother, although I have it on a couple machines. Flash doesn't work so well on my ipad either. But if you have flash installed, you need flashblock in FF, or its just advertising hell.

Re:The only question I have is

[caspy7]

Firefox 4 makes no changes to 3.6 profiles so you can switch back and forth on the same profile - I have been doing this with the betas.
You just can't run the two versions concurrently.

Re:The only question I have is

[bertok]

Benchmarks don't give an indication of "real life" performance, which is to be blunt, quite shit.

I run the betas on several platforms, all high-end machines with next-gen SSDs, 64-bit, etc... and FF is slow. Especially during startup, it does a crazy amount of I/O, which gets worse over time.

Developers wouldn't notice this while doing micro benchmarks of nightly builds with a fresh Firefox user profile, because it takes a few weeks or months of real-world usage to really bog it down.

The mozilla devs really need to start investigating the growth and fragmentation of their SQLite databases, or whatever the source of the problem is.

Here's a rule of thumb I like to use: If your end-user app does so much I/O during common tasks that it runs slow on a high-end SSD, then you've made some big design errors.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit314]

did your mother name you "HaZardman27"?

why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Did your mother name you MichaelKristopeit314? Is that what is written on your birth certificate?
Why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? What are you afraid of?

Re:The only question I have is

[Aighearach]

My experience (on linux) is the opposite, FF4 improves load time at least 3x. That's with 30+ tabs, anyways.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit302]

my given name is Michael Kristopeit. my user accounts are numbered as per the infrastructure of this internet web site chat room message board.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[dropadrop]

Given the burden of the many ad-ons I run, I'm not sure which is fucking up, the browser or the add-ons.

One nice thing about running 8GB RAM on a 32-bit system with PAE enabled is that when FF gobbles memory it maxes out at 4GB!

I'll keep it for the add-ons. RAM is cheap.

I've been trying to think of an excuse to get permission to upgrade my work laptop from 4 to 8GB. You gave me a great argument, thanks.

Re:The only question I have is

[klui]

I'll have to see if beta8 improves. But FF is dog dog slow if your history window is up and you visit a site. There is some contention between updating the history file, updating its window, and all other windows--and updating the history file/window wins the contention.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they (very) recently moved to an asynchronous IO pathway for some things for exactly that reason. Don't have a bug link for you, though. :-/

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Journaling filesystems don't necessarily guarantee that all files are consistent, or even contain what they should have, instead, the contents may be all zeros or something random. The journal just guarantees that the meta data is consistent, i.e. the directories are all right, and the allocated space is properly partitioned between the files. Even with file data journaling turned on, it's not guaranteed that the file will be consistent in the case of a crash, just in a state that is in the order the application has written it, so you could end up with just the first few bytes.

Re:The only question I have is

[God of Lemmings]

Ive experienced this problem 3-4 times. It seems that this is because windows does not immediately write data to disk. I believe that it may be either buffering the data, so when a crash occurs some important file nodes are missing and/or the resulting rollback of the journal undoes the entire transaction. Unfortunately its been two years since I've done any low level file code, so my memory is a little bit fuzzy with regards to it.

Re:The only question I have is

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I'm not going to go fishing out bug numbers, but al of those have been fixed.

Startup is now faster than Chrome and Safari, I/O has been reduced, caches made async, databases get vacuumed periodically etc.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

Orrrrrrrrrr I could just use another browser. Seriously. I'm not that devoted to a browser to give it priority on my RAM.

Re:The only question I have is

[Lord Byron II]

I love all of these FF is so slow stories. It has actually gotten faster and faster with each release, but the damn websites just keep piling on the Javascript. The FF4 should be as fast as any other browser out there (eg, Chrome), but until the webmasters decide to start playing nice with the amount of Flash/JS/etc they add, the browsers are going to be losing ground.

Here's one graph showing FF3.5 vs FF3.6, with 3.6 being the faster. And in a test I did at one point, I found that 3.5 was roughly twice as fast as 3.0.

Graph

Re:The only question I have is

[gad_zuki!]

Lets also get rid of all those extraneous buttons up top and the title bar. I certainly dont need them. Put the forward and back buttons next to the URL box. Oh, lets get rid of the menu bar too, we'll just use an IE-style button to the right of the URL box. What a space saver!

Sercurity is still a huge issue. Flash runs with the credentials of the user! Lets sandbox it. Adobe Reader is a bloaty mess and full of security holes. Lets put in our own native sercure PDF reader.

Performance still isn't great. Maybe we should put each tab in its own process and let the OS schedule load properly. This will also be a defacto sandbox so that one tab cant interfere with other.

Awesome, now lets give it a new spiffy name. Its a shiny new browser, lets call its Chrome. Is that taken yet?

Re:The only question I have is

[Again]

There's more to a browser than rendering and Javascript performance. Firefox has become a hard disk hog. It almost continually writes to disk, which can be very slow, for example on netbooks with first generation SSDs or when you keep your profile on a USB stick (portable Firefox). Worst of all, when it does write to disk, the whole browser locks up. It's barely usable on netbooks for that single reason. You'd think that nothing a browser does could justify writing or reading megabytes of data almost every minute. That's still what happens. (No, extensions or plugins are not involved.)

I'm running the latest update from the firefox 4 daily build ppa on my netbook and it runs nicely. Here is a screenshot of my current workspace: http://i55.tinypic.com/2qa5tn6.png. The only lag that I suffer is when a slashdot page initially loads. Scrolling becomes impossible during that time but once the page is loaded there are no more problems.

I will note that Firefox 4 still uses a lot of memory at times. Right now, I have 13 tabs open, firefox has been running for 44:58 and is using up 16% of my 2 GB of memory.

Also, my netbook does not have a ssd but a slow hard drive.

Re:The only question I have is

[antdude]

How much RAM do you have now?

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

The Firefox trolls are out in full force I see.

Here, let me fix the previous statements: Firefox is flawless and without equal. Nothing that the Firefox devs do is ever anything less than perfection and any perceived problems with Firefox are due to the fault of your OS, your hardware, other software or anything except for Firefox itself.

Re:The only question I have is

[clarkn0va]

Did that. FF portable on a reasonably fast USB stick (OCZ Rally 2) would still freeze up for seconds at a time. Mind you this was almost 2 years ago; I think it was FF 3.0 portable at the time, but none of the above made the problem go away. Maybe things have improved since then, but I have no pressing need to run FF portable lately, so I don't presently care to find out.

Re:The only question I have is

[Tromad]

I also experience this, enough so that I no longer have it start where I last left off when opening the browser, otherwise it would hang for 2 minutes. Starts instantly with a simple homepage.

Re:The only question I have is

[Gordo_1]

I may also be completely pathetic, however the next time a job interviewer googles my name, they're unlikely to find out that I got into a completely pathetic argument over meaningless comments on a discussion board with other anonymous losers.

Re:The only question I have is

[YttriumOxide]

After reading your post I did a very quick test in .NET using System.IO.File.Open :

• When opening a file as read only and failing to close it, there is no effect.
• When opening a file as read/write and failing to close it, there is no effect.
• When opening a file as read/write, writing a little bit and then failing to close it, the little bit that was written is all that remains.

Repeating the test with a FAT32 filesystem, I had the following results :

• When opening a file as read only and failing to close it, there is no effect.
• When opening a file as read/write and failing to close it, there is no effect.
• When opening a file as read/write, writing a little bit and then failing to close it, the little bit that was written is all that remains

So, my tests showed the same results... I then tried System.IO.File.AppendAllText to append large amounts of data to an existing text file and deliberately crashing it before it finished.
Under NTFS, the file was zeroed. Under FAT32, the file contained the original data plus part of what I was writing (I assume up to the point that it had written when I crashed it).

Note that I can't say if this is a fair test since I don't know what underlying stuff .NET is actually calling, but it's the only dev environment I have on my Windows system (which is my work box)). However this test definitely shows a difference between NTFS and FAT32 in some circumstances. Not where I first expected, but definitely somewhere...

Perhaps it'd be fair to blame both NTFS *and* Firefox for this one - Mozilla could have found a better way to write the data after all (which they eventually did by switching to a database, but I get the feeling they could've achieved it more simply in a minor update beforehand)

Re:The only question I have is

[xtracto]

Well... I've been using the daily snapshots (4.0b9pre right now) and it is still sloooooow to start.

I like to call it "the beast". Usually, at the beginning of my working week, I start my computer "fresh". Then, after working on some stuff I decide I need to look at some webpage quickly; usually I ponder for about 5 seconds whether to launch Firefox or Google Chrome... and usually it Chrome wins because, during all the time Firefox starts I can already launch Chrome and search whatever I wanted to.

I like firefox and use it daily but it FEELS *reaaly* slow... Also, FF4 removed the status bar which is something I don't like (e.g. the URL of a destination web-page cannot be seen after hovering a link [it shows cut down in the address bar). It seems Mozilla is on the right track screwing and screwing with Firefox :(

Now that Opera has extensions, I will have to have a look... Unforutnately I am so additcted to TreeStyle tabs that it will be difficult to move.

Re:The only question I have is

[xtracto]

Someone should make a Task Manager similar to Chrome's to see how much memory and CPU is each addon eating.

Also, why do I still need to RESTART the browser after installing, enabling or disabling an extension? Google Chrome should include some fairy dust because it is trivial to install, enable or disabling an extension.

Thus, in Chrome it is easy to have a lot of extensions installed (invisible hand, xmarks, tackynotes, sessionbuddy, etc) without eating ram and only enable them when you use them (without needing to restart the darn browser).

Re:The only question I have is

[kestasjk]

Fine here

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

A RAM drive on Windows is setup, using OSS, by installing a single application. It's not beyond anyone means.

Re:The only question I have is

[David Gerard]

FF4b is way more responsive for my usage (a metric arseload of tabs) than FF 3.6. I'm just waiting for my extensions to update.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

my user accounts are numbered as per the infrastructure of this internet web site chat room message board.

That number is #1962652, not 302. Is your given name MichaelKristopeit302? Why do you cower behind chosen pseudonyms? What are you afraid of? You are completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[damien_kane]

True, but then going into the about:config in firefox and repointing cache paths is a bit beyond (what I've seen in) your "average" user, as is modifying the Windows TEMP environment variable.
Add to that, that if you happen to be using an SSD, it's suggested that you not auto-write the contents of the RAMdrive to disc every 5 minutes (as is the default) as it's all throwaway data anyways (mostly non-volatile caches are fine). Auto-commit is the default operation of most ramdrive setups.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit323]

perhaps you'll never not be unable to provide for yourself.

perhaps you'll never not work for employers that value THE TRUTH.

you're an idiot.

Re:The only question I have is

[syockit]

And what all this have to do with ramdrive?

Re:The only question I have is

[syockit]

Because it does not use Mozilla Jetpack. Chrome/Opera's add-on didn't do modifications to the browser's inner workings, that's why they do no need restart after install. If you installed a Jetpack-based add-on, you'd realize that you do not need to restart the browser. So if you're still needing to restart for a simple add-on, you can blame the add-on developer. I was surprised when you mentioned Chrome not eating RAM for add-ons, because Chrome spawns a process for each of them and thus create a large total overhead. But then I saw it justified by you saying it can be enabled only when you need it.

Re:The only question I have is

[swilly]

.NET will automatically close file streams when the reader or writer is collected by the garbage collector or when the application exits. To test the problem you would need to use the lower level C++ APIs.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit324]

the number is 302... you are unable to understand that, because you're an idiot.

cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing the truth with your truth.

By the way, I'd like fries with that order.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit325]

ur mum's face're confucing the truth with your truth.

you are unable to recognize the truth, because you're an ignorant hypocrite.

cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[YttriumOxide]

.NET will automatically close file streams when the reader or writer is collected by the garbage collector or when the application exits. To test the problem you would need to use the lower level C++ APIs.

Hence crashing the app rather than exiting cleanly... I could confirm the file was NOT closed by trying to access it in another program (my text editor)

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been in a similar situation, trying to download a large file in Firefox from a flaky webhost. On Windows (NTFS), the download hiccuped and the file was basically obliterated. When re-downloading, I switched to Linux (ext3) and even though the connection dropped again, the downloaded portion remained and I was able to start the download again from where I has left off. Thanks Linux!

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

ur mum's face're confucing the truth with your truth.

This explains a lot. Do your mommy and daddy know that you visit web sites that are for grown ups?

ignorant hypocrite

And you here not understanding the definition of the word "hypocrite" are calling others ignorant. What irony.

cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

How very predictable of you. You really do have a single track mind.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit321]

you are HYPOCRITICALLY defining "the" truth as DIFFERENT THROUGH CAPABILITY OF CONFUSION from the truth's i provide. you don't understand this as hypocrisy BECAUSE YOU ARE A HYPOCRITE.

ur mum's face really do have a single track mind.

you're an idiot.

cower some more, feeb. refresh your browser. beg that i pointed out your ignorance.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

you are HYPOCRITICALLY defining "the" truth as DIFFERENT THROUGH CAPABILITY OF CONFUSION from the truth's i provide. you don't understand this as hypocrisy BECAUSE YOU ARE A HYPOCRITE.

Whatever school you went to needs to give you a refund.

ur mum's face really do have a single track mind.

The fact that you don't even possess the ability to understand or utilize words above childhood level or in a coherent fashion is testimony to your ignorance. It's hilarious how you consistently and spectacularly make a fool of yourself. It's like watching the drunk guy at the pub try to dance on the bar and taking a spill to the floor.

you're completely pathetic.

You should just make that your sig. It would save you from having to type it out at the end of all of your posts.

Go on, keep commenting. The rest of us will continue to point and laugh at you.

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit321]

who is "us"?

you are exactly what you've claimed to be: NOTHING.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

who is "us"?

Everyone on Slashdot, apparently. Here is a short (relatively speaking) excerpt of your posts from just a couple of your sockpuppet accounts for today alone.

ur mum's face've shown your incompetence. of course it doesn't matter if i HAVE the hashed numbers... the exploit exists in the hash numbers REMAINING STORED ON AMAZON'S SERVERS AND BEING USED BETWEEN AMAZON'S SERVERS AND THE PAYMENT PROCESSOR IN LIEU OF AN ACTUAL CARD NUMBER.

you're an idiot.

i don't require help. you are not authorized to prescribe. you're exactly what you've claimed to be: NOTHING.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of? you're completely pathetic.

ur mum's face's inability to understand what's going doesn't change reality. perhaps you're not familiar with man in the middle attacks... or perhaps you just hypocritically ignore the potential they provide.

you're an idiot.

ur mum's face're confucing the truth with your truth. you are unable to recognize the truth, because you're an ignorant hypocrite.

cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i'll bring unto you the ultimate punishment for your transgressions. cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

who is "us"? you are NOTHING.

ur mum's face'll have to tell you what those 'optimal' products are, because i don't have to do anything.

did your mother name you "segedunum"? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

the number is 302... you are unable to understand that, because you're an idiot. cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

you're an idiot if you believe that. keep pushing your pathetic excuses for your logical failures. considering every line of code doesn't interact with every other line, it's quite obvious your claims of exponentiality are completely ridiculous.

you're an idiot.

did your mother name you "TangoMargarine"? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

perhaps you'll never not be unable to provide for yourself. perhaps you'll never not work for employers that value THE TRUTH.

you're an idiot.

I could whip up a tiny shell script that entirely replaces your existence. It would only have to randomly spew "ur mum's face", "you're an idiot", "why do you cower", "NOTHING/you are NOTHING", "you're completely pathetic" and "THE TRUTH".

That said, it's difficult to imagine that you have any friends. You very obviously have some insecurity issues and the mentality of a little kid. Did you get beat up a lot and now try to take out your frustrations of inadequacy online or something?

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit328]

i am on slashdot. you do not speak for me, as i'm sure you do not speak for others. i have heard NO ONE ask for you to speak for them. you're a logical peabrain. an ignorant hypocrite.

i'm sure you could have done many things that you ended up never doing and never will.

cower some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[Anonymous Coward]

*points and laughs*

Re:The only question I have is

[MichaelKristopeit329]

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:The only question I have is

[xtracto]

I was surprised when you mentioned Chrome not eating RAM for add-ons

Oh now I never said that, in fact it is the contrary; in my experience Google Chrome uses quite a lot of more memory than Firefox exactly for the reasons you cite. Nevertheless Chrome *feels* really fast and snappy!

But then I saw it justified by you saying it can be enabled only when you need it.

Actually, some time ago I was experimenting to a Chrome extension that showed the "list of extensions" when you clicked the icon and let you enable/disable them. Unfortunately, the Chrome extension API does not allow you to access the special chrome.send() function to enable/disable extensions. Also, there is no keyboard-shortcut to the extension configuration page.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

moron...

I like it

[hansamurai]

Looking forward to getting this update, my beta 7 doesn't see the update available yet.

Only problem I've been having is that it crashes my graphics drivers periodically (Nvidia 189.5 I think). But performance is great and once I got my normal status bar back, I really like Firefox 4. Big fan of Sync too and looking forward to having Firefox 4 available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of graphics, the fact that they still have not fixed this bug after all these years is pretty depressing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486918

Yet another indication that webkit has solidly outdone gecko.

Re:I like it

[WMD_88]

I have that too, but only on Windows. Heh heh. I tried updating to ~250.something or whatever but that didn't fix it. You could disable hardware acceleration in Firefox if you want, that should stop the crashing. Haven't tried it to see what it does to performance, though. Should be interesting to see if beta 8 fixes this.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit308]

yes, you are many things, including a moron.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

URL Bar

[TheL0ser]

as well as URL bar enhancements

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

Yes, part of that is resistance to change, but part is from my first experience involved typing a URL and seeing results getting pulled from the middle of a page's title that had nothing to do with what I wanted.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh the "killed my love of Firefox bar", I'm all for change but co-opting the place that I use to enter URLs (however apparently manual and stupid it might be to do so) for some kind of bookmark/history search was a stupid, stupid idea.

I had a lot of respect for the Mozilla team until version 3, then I found Chrome and never looked back.

Re:URL Bar

[Fusen]

that's actually a positive for a lot of people including me, if I can't remember the full url to a page I visited but remember what was being discussed, I can normally find it. you can turn the awesomebar off as well iirc

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

as well as URL bar enhancements

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

As a long time Firefox user, this has been one of the most infuriating things, as they continually remove or fuck up useful features. The Mozilla developers seem obsessed with changing things just to make them different. The list of things they have eliminated or made less useful is almost endless. I'm sure they can give us all sorts of rationalizations for what they do, but it's all bullshit. Making things less useful is not an improvement.

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

that's actually a positive for a lot of people including me, if I can't remember the full url to a page I visited but remember what was being discussed, I can normally find it. you can turn the awesomebar off as well iirc

Uh ... no. You are not recalling correctly. The Awful Bar cannot be turned off. There is an extension which attempts to restore the URL bar to its previous functionality but it doesn't work.

Let's review. I used to be able to click on the URL bar and drop down a list of all the URLs I had manually typed in recently. This was a really nice feature. If I visited a website a few days ago, but forgot to bookmark it, I could just drop down the URL list and select it from there. But now we have this wonderful improvement. The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually. What a load of crap.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my FF 3.6.13 set to only provide URLs for bookmarks when I type into the address bar.

Re:URL Bar

[radish]

If I visited a website a few days ago, but forgot to bookmark it, I could just drop down the URL list and select it from there

Only if you had visited it by typing the URL. If you'd got there by following a link, it wouldn't be there. Given the likelihood of one of those vs the other, I personally found the drop down "typed URL history" completely useless. The history, on the other hand, contains all the visited sites - whether typed or not - so you can still look there to find it.

Better yet, if you remember something about the site or page (for example a word from the page title) then typing that in the URL bar will usually find it pretty quickly. I don't know about you but I'm much more likely to remember that the page was about "geeky shirts" than that I'd visited it on Friday afternoon via a typed URL.

Re:URL Bar

[HockeyPuck]

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

I'm actually quite a fan of the awesome bar. I know i'm probably in the minority around here, but when I create a bookmark I just add a few tags to the bookmark and I'm done. No more having to go through folders and submenus of bookmarks. Also makes it easier to search through my history, especially if I want to run the same google query. Makes it pretty handy in that respect.

I know that if you have a bad experience you tell 10 people and if you have a good experience you tell 1 person.

Re:URL Bar

[Fusen]

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/06/17/dont-think-the-firefox-3-awesome-bar-is-awesome-heres-how-t/ you tried that?

Re:URL Bar

[firewrought]

The list of things they have eliminated or made less useful is almost endless.

What sort of things? And was Awesomebar really that infuriating? Are people paralyzed by seeing the dropdown options as they type? Seems sooooo much easier than using the history panel to me.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.

They're not random, they're your most visited sites.

I think the Awesome Bar is great. I very rarely bookmark anything now, I just type a few keywords into the address bar and can usually find what I want quite easily, and the more often you visit a site the sooner it will appear. So if I want the visit the BBC website I only have to type b, press the down arrow key once and tap return, or for Youtube I just have to type y instead, I find it really quick and easy.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

as well as URL bar enhancements

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

As a long time Firefox user, this has been one of the most infuriating things, as they continually remove or fuck up useful features. The Mozilla developers seem obsessed with changing things just to make them different. The list of things they have eliminated or made less useful is almost endless. I'm sure they can give us all sorts of rationalizations for what they do, but it's all bullshit. Making things less useful is not an improvement.

I'm a Firefox developer. I understand that it can seem that way, but trust me, a lot of thought goes into each change we make. I'm not saying we are always right, or even always right for most people - nobody's perfect. But I do think that overall we do a good job, in picking what to change, and for the specific stuff you dislike, most of it should be configurable through prefs.

But, I realize that doesn't help you, and I'm sorry that some of our changes are not to your taste.

Re:URL Bar

[fotbr]

Yes, awesomebar IS that infuriating. Paralyzed by seeing options, no, but give us the option to turn off behavior we don't like. Is it THAT hard to do?

No. It isn't. It is simply the devs saying "this is a better way, and you'll use it whether you like it or not", which isn't a cool attitude if you want to keep your user base.

And yes, I've switched away from FF for that reason -- not that awesomebar chased me away, but the attitudes of the devs did.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually. What a load of crap.

That would be the History feature, View... By Last Visited. Or by date & site, if you prefer.

Re:URL Bar

[ThatMegathronDude]

You're either a machine or just resistant to change. Or you don't actually browse anything but static sites where you can memorize URLs (but then why return, nothing is new?).

Forgot the video id of that youtube video you want to show to a friend? Didn't bookmark or subscribe to that thread on a forum? Just type a few words in the Awesome Bar and you'll usually have it right there in the top ten results.

Re:URL Bar

[TheL0ser]

you can turn the awesomebar off as well iirc

From what I've found and done, not so much "turn off" as "attempt to beat into submission". Spending a couple hours in about:config got me to something that was like what I had, but still isn't great.

Re:URL Bar

[GreatBunzinni]

Yes, awesomebar IS that infuriating. Paralyzed by seeing options, no, but give us the option to turn off behavior we don't like. Is it THAT hard to do?

No, you only need to hit "edit"->"Preferences"->"Privacy" and in the "Location bar" section, where it says "when using the location bar, suggest:" just select "Nothing" from the dropdown menu.

Now that you know that, if it is that infuriating then how come you failed to even look at Firefox's preferences to disable it?

On the side note, I love the awesome bar. I configured it to display only bookmarked links (that option is also available in the dropdown menu I mentioned) and now, instead of clicking through multiple menus or, *ghasp*, use a search engine, I just hit Ctrl+L, type a couple of keys and voila: I'm opening the link. You say infuriating? I say godsend.

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.

They're not random, they're your most visited sites.

No they're not. I just dropped down the list and one of the the items is from about a week ago and all the rest are much older. It isn't showing recent browsing history, it isn't showing URLs I've recently typed in manually. It isn't showing anything even remotely useful.

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

If I visited a website a few days ago, but forgot to bookmark it, I could just drop down the URL list and select it from there

Only if you had visited it by typing the URL.

Yes, that is what I was referring to. I may not have said it clearly.

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

and I'm sorry that some of our changes are not to your taste.

It's not a matter of "taste". Tabs on top versus tabs on bottom is a matter of taste. The orange Firefox button versus a regular menu bar is a matter of taste. Removing functionality, so that I can no longer do things that I used to be able to do is not a matter of "taste"..

Re:URL Bar

[Anaerin]

Isn't it ironic, that the feature that you are so hateful of in Firefox (The awesomebar) is a lesser version of Chrome's "Omnibox", that not only searches your history and bookmarks (Something that you espouse so much hate over) but the web as well. Yet you don't seem to mind Chrome's history/bookmark/web search bar near so much as you do FireFox's history/bookmark bar.

Re:URL Bar

[techmuse]

It's a bug that the FF developers don't believe exists. Please see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=620723.

Re:URL Bar

[nabsltd]

The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.

It's quite easy to restore the functionality to what you want...just set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 49 in about:config. I find that "17" works better for me, as it will also search for non-typed URLs.

To restore the URL bar to its former appearance, add the following lines to "userChrome.css" (in your Firefox profile):

/* Hide the "bookmark star" and the "Go button" on the location bar */
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #star-button,
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #go-button
{
display: none !important;
}

/* Set the location bar to show only URLs, on one line */
.autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none}
.ac-title description{font-size:11px!important}
.autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important}
.ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none}
.ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important}
.ac-url description{color:MenuText!important}
.ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/06/17/dont-think-the-firefox-3-awesome-bar-is-awesome-heres-how-t/ [switched.com] you tried that?

LOL. The "solution" in that link completely eliminates all items from the drop down URL list (ie, it sets it to zero). Not very useful.

Re:URL Bar

[f.ardelian]

The Awesome Bar is just awesome! The OP is too lazy or stubborn to spend a few minutes to learn how to use it.

Re:URL Bar

[rudy_wayne]

You're either a machine or just resistant to change. Or you don't actually browse anything but static sites where you can memorize URLs (but then why return, nothing is new?).

I'm neither a machine nor resistant to change -- provided that the "change" actually makes sense.

Forgot the video id of that youtube video you want to show to a friend? Didn't bookmark or subscribe to that thread on a forum? Just type a few words in the Awesome Bar and you'll usually have it right there in the top ten results.

That's what the History panel is for. I type a word into the search box and I find that forum thread I was looking for. So, in other words, they eliminated a perfectly good and useful function (dropping down a list of manually typed URLs) so that they could duplicate the functionality of the History panel. This is a perfect example of a change that makes no sense.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

as well as URL bar enhancements

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

As a long time Firefox user, this has been one of the most infuriating things,...

Try using Chrome for a while, then you will love how the location bar works in FF... Chrome likes to search Google for you in this space, and the non-consecutive search/filter leaves much to be desired.

Thank you for the poorly named, but nice to use Awesome Bar.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

So, in other words, they eliminated a perfectly good and useful function (dropping down a list of manually typed URLs) so that they could duplicate the functionality of the History panel.

How many URLs do you actually even visit by manually typing them?! It sounds to me like you are trying to duplicate the perfectly good functionality of bookmarks.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Add one more to the minority stack. AFAIAC, AwesomeBar deserves its name (in the Internet sense of 'awesome', if that makes sense).

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

Semi-offtopic, but why, why does Firefox insist on polling some unknown number of locations finding plugins and extensions when it starts up? Somebody needs to make something like autoruns for Firefox... what it loads, where it’s located, and if I’m an administrator let me remove it already. I ended up stumbling around looking for particular .dll files mentioned in about:plugins and deleting them physically, which I suspect isn’t the right way to go about doing it. At least, I hope it isn’t the right way of doing it.

So where does it look? Registry keys, folders, some combination of those?

Also, building an option to disable checking certain locations would be nice... such as for Portable Firefox, which is supposed to be self-contained but still loads up all of the plugins off the computer I plug it into, even if that computer doesn’t have Firefox installed! Plug a pristine copy of Portable Firefox into a pristine Windows install and you’ll find that you still have .NET, Silverlight, Windows Media Player, etc. plugins loading up. WTF.

Re:URL Bar

[Thomasje]

I'm personally pretty pleased with Firefox and found every new release to be an improvement so far. The fact that sometimes a configuration setting disappears from Preferences and then has to be set through about:config, it's not ideal, but not exactly a big deal either since I only have to do it once.

Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.

I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really miss is the full URL in the status bar.
They only show the first little bit in the awesomebar, but thats useless a lot of times since I want to know what kind of file it's pointing to (html, jpg, pdf, etc)
Is there an option to turn that functionality back on?

Re:URL Bar

[edibobb]

The simple solution to the Awesomebar is to give priority to the beginning of a URL. For example, when I type in "dev," it currently brings up sourceforge.net first instead of a recent url that begins with dev. This is the characteristic that alienates some users, it would be easy to change, and I believe that most users, by far, would prefer it to be changed. It's a little like Google Chrome bookmarks. They work pretty much like those in Firefox, except Google left out keyboard functionality so you can press S, for example, and jump down to the S's in your bookmark list. Because of this, Google is getting nonspecific complaints about how the bookmarks don't work right and are hard to use. A minor change in something that users are used to and expect will drive them away, even if they don't realize exactly what the problem is.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

Can you give an example of removing functionality, so I more clearly understand what you mean?

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

They only show the first little bit in the awesomebar

I’m not seeing the problem, I see the whole URL, granted if the URL is really long I guess you wouldn’t see the whole thing, but that same limitation would apply to the status bar, too.

Is there an option to turn that functionality back on?

It still shows the URL in the status bar if you open up the History sidebar, so that might work for you.

Re:URL Bar

[DirePickle]

This is not a solution for the people that just want it to behave like URL bars always have in the past. Normal URL bar behavior: I have visited the page www.slashdot.org many times in the past. I hit ctrl-L, www.sl, and www.slashdot.org is presented as the first option in the drop down menu. That is, it goes through the URL bar history to find something matching what I just typed. Awesome bar behavior: I type www.sl... and I get fifteen youtube URLs, and then slashdot at the very bottom. This is an extreme example, but a common occurrence. (Not necessarily with /. per se, but with many other websites).

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand the thing. Although it's sometimes useful, the problem is the inconsistent order urls get listed in. Depending on my recent usage, 'abc.' fluctuates between 'abc.foo' and 'abc.bar'. That means I have to actually look at the dropdown every time I start typing in a site rather than using 'finger memory' to just down-arrow once or twice. The speed is also God awful. For someone like me, I've lost efficiency (I'm more than willing to bookmark what I'm interested in or search history as need be).

The big issue, though, it FF dev's attitude of 'F-U, learn to like it.' Some people love the thing, fine. Some people hate it legitimately, fine for them, too. Make it configurable, and not just with the current kludges. I know the 'awesomebar' required some major changes and it would take some effort to make it truly configurable but maybe this should have been considered before completely altering the behavior of a common browser gui element.

If there was a viable alternative to FF3, I'd be on it in a heartbeat.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

Sorry, I don't know much about how it's done on Windows. All I know is that on Linux, it is generally /usr/lib/firefox/plugins and ~/.mozilla/extensions

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

have you tried to configure in firefox preferences where suggestions should come from? you can use bookmarks, bookmarks+history, history and nothing (v3.6.13 here)

for me awesomebar also works just fine
d - diablo3 forum, st - starcraft 2 forum, sta - gosugamers.net/starcraft, sl - slashdot, y - youtube, u - ubuntuforums, f - facebook. Just like the other AC i almost stopped using bookmarks on ff panel, because ctrl+L and max 3 keypresses and I get exactly what i look for

my guess is that firefox remembers exact key sequences that were used to invoke the webpage, like in case of 'st' vs 'sta' and sorts suggestions by the number of hits. That's why in the beginning it looks like garbage because there is no data to work with but soon everything is as it should be once the most visited sites get promoted.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

The big issue, though, it FF dev's attitude of 'F-U, learn to like it.'

Not sure where you got that impression - I'm a Firefox dev, and I definitely don't think that way. As I said above, I'm sad when people don't like our changes.

Re:URL Bar

[GreatBunzinni]

Again, look at the damned options I've mentioned. Click on the drop-down menu and select "History". There. Why spend so much energy whining when you can simply tell the damned program what to wish it to do? What else do awesome bar-haters want? Being spoon-fed their porridge?

Re:URL Bar

[DirePickle]

That is not what that option does. All of those youtube and otherwise-unrelated URLs are not coming from my bookmarks. They are coming from my history. The awesome bar uses some magic to compare the string you've typed to *any character string* in any URL anywhere ever in your history. It doesn't do the sensible thing, which is *first* look for an exact match at the beginning of the URL. This is the sane way in which URL bars traditionally work.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't mean to throw every FF dev under the bus - I'm grateful for all the work and generally a nice product. I was aiming my comment in the direction of Edward Lee. I don't think he ever said 'F-U' directly (although it wouldn't surprise me if he did), but that was the gist and tone of his comments toward awesomebar detractors. Various Mozilla message boards make this a matter of record.

As for not liking your changes, please consider making changes to base functionality of a program element optional. As I said, I realize such an option for the awesomebar would be difficult but rather than replacing the location bar with a search bar why not *add* it? Then via option people could display one or both of them.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

Awesome bar behavior: I type www.sl... and I get fifteen youtube URLs, and then slashdot at the very bottom.

No...

Awesome bar behavior: I type s, and http://slashdot.org/ is at the top of the list, because that’s the only website I ever visit that I type “s” to get to. In fact if I started typing www I’d just confuse it.

But, if I type c, http://slashdot.org/~clone52431/comments is at the top of the list, which is actually part of the same site; Firefox remembers that’s what I type to go to that page...

g is http://www.google.com/search?q=
m is http://maps.google.com/
m- is http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/
e is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
If I was on my home computer, ma or mai would probably put Gmail at the top of the list. Etc.

Re:URL Bar

[samael]

Just to say - I love the awesome bar. I think it's, well, awesome. Makes it so much easier finding something I know I looked at recently, but can't remember exactly where.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

Although it's sometimes useful, the problem is the inconsistent order urls get listed in. Depending on my recent usage, 'abc.' fluctuates between 'abc.foo' and 'abc.bar'.

The problem is that you’re typing abc, which is ambiguous. The browser is trying to eliminate ambiguity in as few keystrokes as possible, and you’re defeating it... in fact you couldn’t defeat it more effectively if you tried.

The solution is simple. If you typed “abc” and “bar”, or “foo” and “abc”, or even “foo” and “bar”, you wouldn’t have that problem.

Re:URL Bar

[DirePickle]

That inconsistency is part of the trouble with the awesome bar. I don't go to Accuweather too often, but I've been there in the last couple of weeks. If I type in 'ac' or 'www.ac', my options are, in order:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662909&page=2
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=userinfo&user=
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/10/07/new-software-adjusts-actors-body-shapes-automatically/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+(Neatorama)
https://chaseonline.chase.com/MyAccounts.aspx
http://www.accuweather.com/
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/#ss

I find this asinine, but some people like it. That's fine. Give me the option to have something sane and consistent. As someone else mentioned elsewhere, if they would just put the items with exact matches at the beginning of the domain first on the list (or give the option for it), it would help a lot. Then they'd just have to work on how slow it is.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

Generally you can train it by typing more of the address (but leave off that www part, that’s silly), clicking the result as soon as it’s near enough the top, and then repeating the process a few more times. How do you think I got http://www.google.com/search?q= to be my top result by typing g?

Re:URL Bar

[DirePickle]

Diff'rent strokes. I use multiple computers and multiple OSes. I don't want to have to train it on each and still rely on the vagaries of Awesome Bar voodoo--which is easily confused if you browse to a *different* URL a couple of times after typing in the same string. For the websites where I care enough to want to just type a letter or a shortcut to have it load (on the computers that belong to me), I have bookmarks with a keyword set, and I can just sync them or set them everywhere or whatever.

As for www--a couple of things. Sometimes domain.tld does not work if you neglect adding it, or it takes you somewhere different. I guess that happens less frequently these days, but it's a habit to make sure. More apropos, in sane URL bars that look for an exact match of your input, www.blah pretty much forces it to display exactly what I want as the first option. The Awesome Bar more or less randomly ignores the www. part when it goes scouring the database, though, so yeah typing it's pretty useless in FF.

Re:URL Bar

[siddesu]

Removing the fucking status bar. I don't know which idiot came up with this brilliant concept, but he (or she) is the reason I'm dumping firefox for greener pastures.

The reason that broke the back of the proverbial camel that is.

Re:URL Bar

[Pascal Sartoretti]

If by "enhancements" they mean "throw the awesomebar out a window", I'm all for it.

Please no. I hated the awesomebar at first, but now it works so well (at least for me...) that I have given up managing bookmarks. What a relief.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

As for not liking your changes, please consider making changes to base functionality of a program element optional.

I agree it's important. We try to do that when feasible, and we're actually making plans now to do that more, some of that discussion appears in this thread.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, given all the uproar about the AwesomeBar, was the option of simply turning it off and restoring previous functionality not implemented? The option was there during the beta of 3, but removed afterwards.

I think it's ugly, I think it's inconsistent, but primarily, I think the lag from the constant db queries it generates are part of the reason FF is becoming viewed as the most bloated browser.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

Sometimes domain.tld does not work if you neglect adding it, or it takes you somewhere different. I guess that happens less frequently these days, but it's a habit to make sure. More apropos, in sane URL bars that look for an exact match of your input, www.blah pretty much forces it to display exactly what I want as the first option.

If you never visit domain.tld, you should never see it at the top of the search results. I’m a bit perplexed at how this would be a problem. You’d only have to type the full address once, a few times maybe, and after that the full and proper address should appear at the top as soon as you start typing domain.tld.

Re:URL Bar

[kripkenstein]

I agree that optimally, the best thing would be to allow it to be toggled. I wasn't working on that, so I don't know the technical reasons for the decision to do it the way it was, sorry.

About performance: It does cause some lag, but most of that will be fixed for FF4 final. It even works fast on smartphones in mobile firefox.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you're a Firefox developer, please allow me to state my own opinion on the AwesomeBar: PLEASE, keep it.

No, really. I know there's a couple of folks who hate it and have been complaining about it on Slashdot every single time there's a Firefox story, ever since Firefox 3.0 was released, but personally, I love it. I often want to go back to a web page, and being able to quickly find things even if I don't remember the URL (or parts of it) and also using the title instead is INCREDIBLY useful. What's more, it's something that can't be replicated any other way, and I'd entirely unwilling to be hugely inconvenienced just so some wheels squeaking about a very minor inconvenience get greased.

I know you're not actually considering throwing it out, but as a member of the silent majority, I'm kinda fed up with being silent. ;)

Re:URL Bar

[gbjbaanb]

so really, you'd find the awesomebar truly awesome if it put initial search matches at the top instead of just searching all history and bookmark entries. Fair enough - so stop whining about it and tell them that's what you'd like, then post a link to the bug so we can all click on it and agree its a great idea. Or you could just carry on being whiny and we'll all carry on ignoring you.

Personally, I'd like it to also stop suggesting every visited link in a website, and only suggest the site itself. I think that'd be better for me... but others might not agree.

Re:URL Bar

[Blakey Rat]

Jesus Christ, buddy, it's been like 3 fucking years. Either switch browsers, or get over it already!

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think we've been fucking doing? Because it's EXACTLY that.

Re:URL Bar

[trawg]

I had to go back to Firefox because I found the Omnibox utterly useless for how I use an address bar. After getting used to the Awesomebar I have no idea how anyone could use the Chrome one and think it was better.

If Omnibox gave higher priority to keywords in my history like Awesomebar does it would be great, but at the moment if you're used to Awesomebar its almost impossible to adapt.

Re:URL Bar

[Man On Pink Corner]

I'm a Firefox developer. I understand that it can seem that way, but trust me, a lot of thought goes into each change we make.

Like getting rid of the status line at the bottom of a browser, so that I can only see about the first 25 characters of the URL I'm hovering over?

Don't do us any more favors.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that optimally, the best thing would be to allow it to be toggled. I wasn't working on that, so I don't know the technical reasons for the decision to do it the way it was, sorry.

Another AC chiming in here.

I can live with the Awfulbar. Much as I hate to admit it, it's taken a few months, but I've finally beaten its sense of frecency into some form of usefulness. You guys were right; it's annoying as hell, but it'll eventually do something useful if you're patient enough.

But this stuff about FF4 and no status bar? Deal-breaker. When I load a website, I want to know whether it's foo.doubleclick.com that's lagging, foo.mywebsite.com that's lagging (because when I do a reverse DNS on cdn.mywebsite.com, I find that it's some content distribution network that's hosed), or - if I'm reading a thread and hovering over a link, I want to know it's not a goatse link.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

But this stuff about FF4 and no status bar? Deal-breaker. When I load a website, I want to know whether it's foo.doubleclick.com that's lagging, foo.mywebsite.com that's lagging (because when I do a reverse DNS on cdn.mywebsite.com, I find that it's some content distribution network that's hosed), or - if I'm reading a thread and hovering over a link, I want to know it's not a goatse link.

You can still see the targets of links. When you hover on a link, an arrow appears in the URL bar, and the link target afterwards.

It takes a little getting used to - my eyes were used to looking down for the URL - but it works well, and saves screen space.

Re:URL Bar

[Lord Crc]

Removing the fucking status bar. I don't know which idiot came up with this brilliant concept, but he (or she) is the reason I'm dumping firefox for greener pastures.

The reason that broke the back of the proverbial camel that is.

I was a bit perplexed by this as well. I read that a lot of people want FF to mimic Chrome and get rid of the permanent status bar. By sheer luck I found the option to turn it back on: right click next to a tab so you get the menu for toolbars. The "status bar" has been renamed to "Add-on bar", so select it and voila.

So it seems it's not gone forever, just hidden by default. However these are things that need to be clearly marked on the "what's new page" IMHO.

Re:URL Bar

[siddesu]

Thanks, but the "add-on bar" just shows add-on options, it does not provide the most important function of the status bar - looking up URL on mouseover.

This drive to kill URLs and replace them with keywords, which mozilla has been doing since 3.0 and the "smart-ass" address bar just went over the top.

I know that the starting few characters of URLS are now shown in the address bar, however the address bar isn't even close to long enough to display two URLs properly.

And I run on >1500 horizontal resolution.

Anyway, like I said, the current generation of debils who develop for mozilla can very well make a browser for themselves.

No more donations from me.

Re:URL Bar

[gullevek]

It is still not the status bar. When you hover over a link it is now shown next to the url, as the window is so small, you see actually less than when it was in the status bar.

On the other hand, I guess a lot of people lever looked down there anyway.

And Chrome didn't get rid of the status bar, it is still there, only shows when it is needed.

Re:URL Bar

[Man On Pink Corner]

It takes a little getting used to - my eyes were used to looking down for the URL - but it works well

No, it doesn't. Many URLs are longer than the 25-30 characters that typically fit to the right of the arrow in the URL bar. Sometimes this is important.

They need to put the damn status bar back. Nobody asked for this new 'feature.'

Re:URL Bar

[TangoMargarine]

This and the memory leak thing. Anybody starting to see a pattern...?

Re:URL Bar

[xtracto]

For example, the status bar...

They just removed it because... uhm, Chrome did it.

Of course now when you hover your mouse over a link you only get HALF of the target URL showing in the address bar in a grayish color.

Seriously, I am with GP on this. Mozilla guys keep "fixing" things that aren't broken ...

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

The big issue, though, it FF dev's attitude of 'F-U, learn to like it.'

Not sure where you got that impression - I'm a Firefox dev, and I definitely don't think that way. As I said above, I'm sad when people don't like our changes.

Perhaps the culmination of thousands of posts, blogs, bug comments and other things over the last 10 years? It's no single response that's a problem, nor any specific dev, but rather the general attitude displayed towards many people who aren't part of the dev group, stacked layer upon layer upon layer to where it becomes "obvious", even if there's no single data source to back it up.

Re:URL Bar

[cyclomedia]

You're doing it wrong. Type "sl" then use the arrow keys to find "www.slashdot.org" amongst all the crap you mentioned and click it. The VERY NEXT time you type "sl" "www.slashdot.org" will be the top suggestion.

Re:URL Bar

[kestasjk]

The fact that all browsers are doing it now should also be an indication of what people think of it

Re:URL Bar

[MechaStreisand]

Did they actually remove it, instead of making it not visible by default? If so, there's no way I'll ever upgrade to that garbage. What the hell is their problem, anyway?

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

So where's the bug report? Ah, yes. Whine away.

Re:URL Bar

[oreaq]

I haven't used it myself but Status-4-Evar might solve your problem.

Re:URL Bar

[adamfranco]

Another here who loves the AwesomeBar!

I don't have mod-points, so I'll just follow the trend and make this thread an ad-hoc poll.

Re:URL Bar

[PybusJ]

I think you mean _you_ didn't ask for that new feature. Plenty of people were complaining that, in comparison to Chrome, Firefox used a lot of screen space for its UI.

As web use moves towards online applications rather than document browsing, it makes sense that the browser interface becomes less prominent. Of course, there are many very different users of the web; I think these changes benefit the general user.

Fortunately, Firefox has a mature and well supported extension system; I'm confident that extensions will be produced to meet your more specific desires.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

The awesome bar is my favorite FF feature. I wouldn't use FF without it. Please don't change it.

Re:URL Bar

[steelfood]

Maybe because Google uses a better prediction algorithm than simple pattern matching?

What appears immediately is a huge contributing factor to whether the feature is usable (and hence liked) or not.

Re:URL Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

So rather type in the beginning of a url, which is both intuitive and standard operating procedure for a location bar, I should mentally generate tokens representing url's to efficiently utilize the awesomebar? I can only say, WTF - I have enough pw's and other kruft in my mind without having to remember what token is assigned to what url I commonly visit, especially when the behavior of a location bar works fine.

The bottom line still is that turning the location bar into a search bar is a huge change in standard gui element behavior and could have been an option with some forethought.

Re:URL Bar

[clone52431]

So rather type in the beginning of a url, which is both intuitive and standard operating procedure for a location bar, I should mentally generate tokens representing url's to efficiently utilize the awesomebar?

As opposed to typing the beginning of the URL, and then memorizing the position of the result that you wanted in the list of URLs that are suggested, which you’re assuming will never change?

Re:URL Bar

[blind biker]

The above post is misleading: the procedure presented does NOT restore the original behavior of the address bar.

Re:URL Bar

[Man On Pink Corner]

Plenty of people were complaining that, in comparison to Chrome, Firefox used a lot of screen space for its UI.

[Citation needed]

Re:URL Bar

[xtracto]

Yup, they actually removed it not made it "hidden" as a default.

There is an extension (status4evar) but it does not work very well.

Stupid move IMHO.

Re:URL Bar

[Man On Pink Corner]

Awesome. FF beta 8 now has an "Add-on Bar" at the bottom that's even thicker than the old status bar was. Naturally, this "Add-on Bar" is empty of anything but a 'Close' icon.

It looks like the inmates are running the asylum over at Mozilla these days.

Re:URL Bar

[PybusJ]

Yes, that is stupid. I thought, after beta7, they were planning to shrink the add-on bar to match the original status bar. Maybe that's still going to happen.

fine-tuned add-ons manager

[denis-The-menace]

Can this thing prevent covert, un-removable install of add-ons (e.g. .NET Framework Assistant)?

Does it set layout.css.visited_links_enabled to false?
(See http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1894680&cid=34430992)

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[The MAZZTer]

If you execute a program on your computer under a user account with access to your browser's profile directory, it will be able to install addons without your specific consent (because, as far as the computer is concerned, you gave it consent by running the program). Now you can deny your user account write access to the registry keys Firefox checks to load external addons; but at least one Microsoft installer aborts with a fatal error if you do that and rolls back the entire install process.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, it's Mozilla's fault that this is possible, and we're still waiting for a Firefox release that fixes the bug.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[0123456]

In other words, it's Mozilla's fault that this is possible, and we're still waiting for a Firefox release that fixes the bug.

How do you plan to allow Mozilla to install per-user addons without allowing other programs to install addons when logged in as the same user?

If Mozilla runs addons in ~/.addons, then anyone can put one there. If Mozilla reads a list of addons from ~/.addons.list, then any program can add one to it. You can only prevent programs from adding addons by preventing users from changing that configuration, which then means they have to be root or some other privileged user in order to install the addons that they want to install.

And the program installer probably runs as root anyway, so that won't make any difference.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 4 fixes the CSS history bug without having to kill visited links altogether. Essentially it lies to JavaScript so everything looks like it's not been visited.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[MichaelKristopeit307]

are you joking? the operating system layer and file system layer both provide methods to allow access to resources while not allowing changes to those resources.

such a system is trivial. the reason it doesn't exist is the marketeering zealots infesting this site that demand that the user is always the central authority, and the browser has no right to limit how they utilize their own computers... if you demand a door without any knob or locking mechanism, just so it's as easy as possible to open the door when you want it opened, then don't complain when someone else opens it when you'd rather it stay shut.

mozilla = slashdot = stagnated.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... or implement some sort of signing for a list of allowed extensions. "Run everything in an arbitrary directory at startup" doesn't seem to be the most secure way to go about anything.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[0123456]

You know, you really need to do more work on your slashbot, because what it's posting here makes little sense to a human.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[MichaelKristopeit307]

ur mum's face really need to do more work on your slashbot, because you're an idiot.

did your mother name you 0123456? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[0123456]

Yeah... or implement some sort of signing for a list of allowed extensions.

And how do you plan to do that?

If Mozilla can sign an arbitrary list of extensions automatically, then any other application can, even if it has to go poking around inside the Mozilla executable to extract the signing key.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[0123456]

Why do you need to tell me you're completely pathetic?

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[clone52431]

I just wish there was an easier way to track down and uninstall/delete the particular addon/plugin. about:plugins is only slightly helpful – it doesn’t even tell you where the .dll files are located (the plugins.dat file does, but you can’t edit it – it’s automatically generated).

And I have no idea how it even figures out where all of its plugins are located, either... apparently the [HKCU|HKLM]\Software\MozillaPlugins registry keys have something to do with it, as does the %programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox\plugins folder... and that still doesn’t seem to account for all of the plugins.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anaerin]

That's exactly right. Just like it's GM's fault that the cup of coffee I put in a cupholder in my car spilled on my pants when I stomped on the gas pedal (To use one of the oh-so-popular car analogies that I understand is mandatory on this site).

Is it Mozilla's fault that you can install an add-on? No. Is it Microsoft's fault that they didn't ask before installing the add-on in question? Yes! Is it Mozilla's fault that the add-on is not uninstallable from within Firefox? No (MS put the add-on in question in a folder that a regular user doesn't have write-access to without Admin privileges).

Just as video games makers are not liable for the actions of modders, Mozilla is not responsible for the actions of MS.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[BZ]

> Can this thing prevent covert, un-removable install of add-ons
> (e.g. .NET Framework Assistant)?

Not yet. Being worked on.

> Does it set layout.css.visited_links_enabled to false?

You did read http://dbaron.org/mozilla/visited-privacy right? It was linked to from the article mentioned in response to the comment you cite.

The short of it is that layout.css.visited_links_enabled is still true so _you_ get to see the visited links styled differently, but the website is blocked from being able to tell apart visited and unvisited links. And yes, every single Firefox 4 beta has had that fix, including this one.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[denis-The-menace]

Thank you BZ!

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[BZ]

You're quite welcome!

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[MichaelKristopeit311]

why do you continue to act in such a way as to beg to be labeled as such?

why do you choose to cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Tie it in with the firefox sync service, it can compare to a remote stored list of installed addons.

Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla fixed the CSS history bug without disabling :visited:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/Privacy_and_the_:visited_selector

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to read the part where they mentioned that this the final release. People can use the beta version to find bugs and to test the software. No one is forcing anyone to use this version!

Re:1415 bugs?!

[rudy_wayne]

1415 bugs in a mature release of a spec based media rendering engine? how is that possible?

How is it possible? Easy. Last month there was an entry in Bugzilla where they fixed a bug that was submitted in November 2000. That's right 10 years ago -- before Firefox even existed. It means that Firefox is still running old Mozilla code from a decade ago.

Javascript is not the problem, it's the interface.

[electrosoccertux]

Take a page from opera's (11) book, I can be loading my default 20 tabs all at once and the interface is still responsive.
Firefox, good luck, the entire browser chugs to a grinding halt for 10 seconds, then the next 10 seconds it's hitchy but at least responsive.
This is on a quad-core machine running at 3.5ghz. Chrome maxes out all of my cores to 100% and is done rendering in about 4 seconds, AND it's rendering all the ads that are being blocked by adblock. Firefox never uses more than 30%. Bad programming. Opera doesn't use more than 30% at once either, but the user interface is incredibly responsive.

I hear multi-core support is coming, but it's not going to be here in FF4.

Firefox had its chance

[Anonymous Coward]

It has delayed its releases so many times that other browsers like Chrome and Opera have caught up. Despite $50 million a year in Google money, Firefox has gone from the fanboys browser to the second most hated browser after IE6. Now that IE6 market share is limited to china and corporate intranets firefox is getting the heat. Fix your bugs and get it out on time or else.

and it's slow

[electrosoccertux]

That and it's terribly slow. When I want to check websites, I check five. I type one press enter, then CTRL+T, and then start typing. But by tab 3, Firefox is too busy rendering to bother returning the URL results in any timely fashion. I can usually finish typing the url before it's found a result for me.

I credit this to the thugs in charge with superiority complexes who refuse to admit something is wrong and needs fixing.
Opera&Chrome are supremely smoother. One of these days I will just jump ship to Opera. I just don't want to have to learn yet another new interface.

Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[DoofusOfDeath]

It seems to me that if they cleared 1400+ bugs between Beta 7 and Beta 8, then there's a whole lot of significant bugs that still need to be fixed. That doesn't sound like what I'd call "Beta".

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[revlayle]

If it still has bugs and needs more testing before a stable release (or even Release Candidate), then yes, Beta is MORE than an appropriate label. (Methinks, people these days don't really understand what beta software is? Hell, may I don't, anymore.)

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[characterZer0]

I thought alpha meant the feature set and API are not stable, beta meant the feature set and API are stable but there are release-critical bugs, and final meant that there are no more release-critical bugs?

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm still confused with their whole naming scheme on this. I was under the assumption that an Alpha/Beta/RC/Final scheme, that Beta was feature complete, which Firefox wasn't until "Beta 7" which I think was throwing a lot of people.

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[bill_mcgonigle]

You'd think, but the sibling comment says they were adding features until Beta 7. Might as well just call it the Flarmflooz 7 release if words don't have meanings.

Reading a bunch of comments here leads me to believe Beta 9 will be where most beta testers should expect to jump on board.

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[ljgshkg]

I haven't look into details about what bugs they fixed. But for me, firefox's betas are generally pretty stable after Beta3 (for any releases).

Same for this one. I've been trying this since beta 1, and switched it as my main browser by beta 3. It got more stable after that, and I remember I didn't see much real difference since beta 5 when I do browsing everydday. So pretty obviously, those are bugs that are not "serious" for a normal user to the point that they can really notice clearly.

Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label?

[steelfood]

Beta software is completely stable software with an incomplete set of features.

-- Google

Good but great?

[parallel_prankster]

I like that firefox wants to be fast and everything but does it even matter anymore. I have at least 10-15 extensions in my browser and at least one of them keep crashing/leaking memory etc. Does this release have a better plugin container for these extensions? My overall satisfaction with FF is at an all time low because of this. I am not ready to move to chrome yet, but I am seriously thinking about it.

Re:Good but great?

[revlayle]

Not trying to troll a primarily Firefox (but will come off that way anyways, sorry!)... however, if extensions are stopping you from using Chrome, there are "gazillions" of them now (via the Chrome Web Store). I am not sure if there are equivalents to the one you use in FF now, but probably good alternatives are available. Note, Chrome *will* use more memory as each tab, extension and plug-in usually runs sand-boxed in separate processes, but it does have decent performance.

Re:Good but great?

[kripkenstein]

I like that firefox wants to be fast and everything but does it even matter anymore. I have at least 10-15 extensions in my browser and at least one of them keep crashing/leaking memory etc. Does this release have a better plugin container for these extensions?

Firefox 4 will ship with much better plugin and extension support. Plugins already run in a separate process in 3.6, while in FF4 you can also write addons that run that way (using Jetpack). Note that addons will need to have changes made to them, so this won't immediately fix all of these issues if you use older plugins. But, it's a major step forward, and most major plugins are already in the process of updating to FF4.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't write the second moron, but I think he is right...

it is a beta it is supposed to have bugs, when they fixed most bugs it will become a release candidate...

You probably don't have any experience programming, else you wouldn't write such stupid comments...

If I could put in a name I would, but I don't see the point for every forum out there in the world to have an extra account with username + password.

So I just write moron....

No it's not

[bartok]

The download links are still pointing to beta 7.
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Re:No it's not

[anonymousNR]

check this link its an ftp link
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Re:No it's not

[jmorkel]

Download beta 8 here

Re:No it's not

[ljgshkg]

Just go to ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases This kind of slashdot posts are often faster than their website update. But ftp servers are definitely updated when you see these kinda news on slashdot.

Re:No it's not

[pinkushun]

From TFA:

Mozilla’s Melissa Shapiro just informed us that the page we are linking to is a “staged” download page. She noted that the link currently points to unreleased builds. Typically, Mozilla does not enable this particular download page until the final version of a new Firefox 4 Beta is available and we noticed that this Beta installs just as other Betas did. However, if you want to be certain that you download the final Beta 8, we advise our readers to wait until the final build is made available.

You need to use the links in TFA to the direct download page. There doesn't seem to be Linux link either.

addons

[alexo]

The main reason I run FF is the wealth of addons.
Will 4.0 break compatibility?

Re:addons

[rudy_wayne]

Will 4.0 break compatibility?

Does the Pope shit in the woods?

But seriously. The answer is YES! Almost none of your extensions from FF 3.6 will work with FF4. If you are lucky, there might new new versions available. But that is not always the case. It is very common for people to create extensions, sometimes really nice useful ones, and then abandon them.

Re:addons

[alexo]

Does the Pope shit in the woods?

I don't know. Are there many woods in Vatican City?

But seriously. The answer is YES! Almost none of your extensions from FF 3.6 will work with FF4. If you are lucky, there might new new versions available. But that is not always the case. It is very common for people to create extensions, sometimes really nice useful ones, and then abandon them.

The question was about the extent of the breaking changes. Quite a number of addons that I use are "abandoned" and technically incompatible but still work perfectly under 3.6 if I override the compatibility check. Would that still be the case with 4.0?

Re:addons

[clone52431]

It is very common for people to create extensions, sometimes really nice useful ones, and then abandon them.

It’s usually not difficult at all to make them work, though it’s (by design) hidden well enough that you have to look for it.

While Firefox is not running:

%userprofile%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*\extensions\
Browse into each extension’s folder one-by-one, open install.rdf in a text editor and read the <em:name> definition near the top until you find the correct extension. Once you find it, just scroll down to the <em:maxVersion> definition, and change to suit. Save, restart Firefox.

IIRC there is also a way to tell Firefox to just ignore maxVersion and run all extensions regardless.

Re:addons

[TangoMargarine]

Will 4.0 break compatibility?

Have you been around for the last couple releases? The answer is "definitely yes." But there's a "STFU and run it anyway" setting in about:config apparently.

Will it support languages other than JavaScript?

[harmonise]

Will it finally support languages other than JavaScript for client side programming? Just when we seem to be entering a point in time where people finally realize that they can choose the right language for the job, so much is moving to the web where there's only one language or nothing at all.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

moron

Yeah. Delicious toolbar specifically

[presidenteloco]

Can't migrate til that is compatible.
(Yeah I heard the news.)

Re:Javascript is not the problem, it's the interfa

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the interface, it's the SQLite database. Every time you access a page, it has to write to the database. Because it's a flat file it completely shits its pants if you try to write to it 20 things all at once. SQLite is a piece of crap, it's the reason why firefox goes really fast when you make a fresh profile, and therefore the reason why speed bugs never really get looked at properly (because they can't be reproduced with a clean profile surprise surprise.) High time they dumped it for something better IMO.

Try it.

[rrohbeck]

It's just as fast as Chromium now, and with many windows and tabs and after being open for days it seems less of a resource hog than Chromium. Only the startup takes longer, at least with several extensions. There's a Greasemonkey beta for it too now - the last reason that held me back from setting FF as my default browser again.

Re:Javascript is not the problem, it's the interfa

[0123456]

This is not the interface, it's the SQLite database. Every time you access a page, it has to write to the database.

It doesn't _have_ to write to the database, it chooses to write to the database. I believe it's updating things like the time you last visited the page, which I totally don't care about.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you file a bug each time you want to change the color of a bikeshed, and if you repaint the bikeshed in a slightly different color each year then you'll have 10 bugs just for one small bikeshed. The fact that the bikeshed is a slightly different color may reflect evolving trends or the intent of a designer to influence trends. It doesn't mean that the bikeshed was rotten, just that someone felt it could look prettier. And with time, a single person's idea of how to make something look pretty can change.

Note that we tend to file bugs for very small components, so if you think of a project as a building, then we might be talking about painting a single brick (it might be a cornerstone). If you're painting a mural on one side of the building, each brick might need to be painted in a different color, but the end result can look beautiful.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[amicusNYCL]

I'm not sure if he was defending Mozilla so much as pointing out that Firefox is not exactly running on all-new code, which takes them 10 years to fix on occasion.

uhm how is beta 8 news

[Anonymous Coward]

i am running firefox 4.0b9pre which translates to firefox 4.0 beta 9. how is beta 8 news???

Re:uhm how is beta 8 news

[Anonymous Coward]

4.0b9pre which translates to firefox 4.0 beta 9

No, it really doesn't. Did you really miss the "pre" part?

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

So I've been calling commodore64_love the dumbest person on slashdot for quite some time now, but I'm afraid I have to stop. The king is dead! All hail the king!

Want to help? Test Hardware Acceleration...

[gQuigs]

If you do get the beta, go and run this add-on, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/200733/

It will help the Firefox developers learn how best to use hardware acceleration.

1415 bugs fixed...

[lowlymarine]

...and not one of them is broken font rendering. Hell, it actually seems to have gotten even worse since Beta 7. I used to love FIrefox, but I'm definitely sticking with Chrome until they get that cleared up. That blurry nonsense hurts my eyes.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're on Windows, that's Direct2D and DirectWrite, and there's little they can do until Microsoft pushes a patch. They're working on mitigating it as best they can.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[clone52431]

Firefox uses the Windows system (since you’re obviously on Windows) to render fonts. I suggest you change your font settings under Display Properties, Appearance, Effects. I like ClearType. YMMV. If you turn on ClearType you might also want to tweak the settings with the ClearType tuner.

And IIRC it’s completely different in Win7, and I can only test it on Windows XP right now, so it’s up to you and Google in that case.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[DirePickle]

That's the new hardware rendering, using your video card. Disable that and your fonts will look purdy again.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[Anne Honime]

It's the other way round on linux. Chrome font rendering is hopelessly riddled with bugs, and breaks at every minor upgrade.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[Anonymous Coward]

They sure need to get their priorities straight.
Fonts are fugly looking and make your eyes bleed.

Re:1415 bugs fixed...

[WiseWeasel]

Same here. I'm getting unusably bad text rendering with FF4 b7 in Vista, and am disappointed to see it's not fixed in b8. I'm still sticking with 3.6.x for now, but this had better be fixed by the time FF4 gets released.

Downloads still broken on Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Files downloaded in FF4b8 still have the permissions set incorrectly to 600 rather than 644.

Extremely annoying when you download apps as an unpriviledged user but install as an admin as you have to chmod every single file you download.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it finally support languages other than JavaScript for client side programming? Just when we seem to be entering a point in time where people finally realize that they can choose the right language for the job, so much is moving to the web where there's only one language or nothing at all.

JavaScript will remain the only language available on all web browsers everywhere. But, you can write code in other languages and run that on the web. Just like you can run code from all sorts of languages on x86 assembly - you compile into that.

Here is a demo of Python running, clientside, on the web.

JS Benchmarks

[Khopesh]

Are we fast yet.com shows the measurements used by the Mozilla Javascript development team, comparing performance of ff4 to chrome/v8 and safari/nitro using both the sunspider (Mozilla) and v8bench (Google) test suites. LOTS of movement in Firefox over the past few months, including the apparent surpassing of Safari's Nitro engine in both tests and even beating Chrome's V8 in the Mozilla test suite.

This boost is likely due in part to the recently added hardware acceleration. This is listed as supported on all major operating systems (see the Firefox 4 Beta Technology page).

Re:JS Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

The boost in javascript is due in part to hardware accelerated graphics...

You're that guy that thinks you can download more RAM for your computer, aren't you?

Re:JS Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

The boost in javascript is due in part to hardware accelerated graphics...

You're that guy that thinks you can download more RAM for your computer, aren't you?

Sorry, nobody expected you to be that dense. (Then again, I'm the one responding to a troll...)

That should read "... due in part to the recently added optimizations that offload certain content rendering tasks to the GPU for hardware acceleration." Nice job actually reading the link, or for that matter, quoting the GP.

Re:JS Benchmarks

[ljgshkg]

JS benchmarks is surely good. Though I always hoped that firefox can put more force on UI's responsiveness and flash responsiveness. When a facebook flash game runs on chrome with acceptable speed, and IE with OK speed, and firefox is almost not even loading the game right (too slow), there is a problem.

Re:JS Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a fairly subjective question.

Is FF gaining more speed by gobbling up resources or actually refactoring/removing/etc code? I run FF on a few older machines and performance is *horrible*. I keep at it because of several add-ons and extensions that make my life easier. I'm nearly to the point where I'm moving to gChrome because of the resource-gobbling. (Side note, even with every addon/extension disabled, it still eats up RAM like a fat kid and cake)

Re:JS Benchmarks

[Khopesh]

Is FF gaining more speed by gobbling up resources or actually refactoring/removing/etc code? I run FF on a few older machines and performance is *horrible*. I keep at it because of several add-ons and extensions that make my life easier. I'm nearly to the point where I'm moving to gChrome because of the resource-gobbling. (Side note, even with every addon/extension disabled, it still eats up RAM like a fat kid and cake)

I'm not a FF dev and am no longer terribly active on bugzilla, but I'd wager the improvements have reduced resource hoarding greatly. We know JS has been refactored a dozen times over and should therefore assume it is better in all regards even if they're mostly touting performance. The Mozilla team can't speak to the inefficiency of your various add-ons, but disabling them should solve that issue. Keep in mind that XUL (the graphical interface) is implemented in JS, so even that will improve from the JS boosts alone, though there are almost certainly a massive collection of improvements (1415 fixed bugs!) in addition to that.

If your older systems don't have hardware-based graphics acceleration, some of the rendering optimizations will be lost, but it should still represent a significant boost above FF3.

Chrome has its advantages too, specifically in its segregation -- tabs have their own processes, flash is now bundled for optimal support and also sandboxed for performance and security. It also releases faster (due to a larger budget and salaried dev team).

Re:1415 bugs?!

[rudy_wayne]

pointing out that Firefox is not exactly running on all-new code, which takes them 10 years to fix on occasion.

Exactly. When some of your code is 10+ years old, it's not surprising that you can find lots of bugs.

I love the awesome bar

[aeoo]

I seriously hope Firefox doesn't change how the awesome bar works. That's one of the many things I prefer in Firefox to Chrome and all other browsers.

Re:I love the awesome bar

[MMC Monster]

Yes. I love the awesome bar as well. I just wish there was some way to let the general public know how awesome the awesome bar was.

Now I'm not in marketing, but maybe if we started calling it the Really Really Good bar?

Re:I love the awesome bar

[GreatBunzinni]

Me too. The combination of the aweseome bar with the Ctrl+L shortcut key let's me use my browser without having to rummage through countless menus and sub-menus of bookmarks and the like.

Adding to that, I simply don't understand those "OMG awesoembar is teh suck!!1!" people, not because they don't like it (or even gave it a try) but because they can simply turn the god-damned feature off in the options menu. It isn't even necessary to go through the about:config. Just click on the dropdown menu and presto: no awesome suggestions in your location bar.

Re:I love the awesome bar

[clone52431]

The combination of the aweseome bar with the Ctrl+L shortcut key let's me use my browser without having to rummage through countless menus and sub-menus of bookmarks and the like.

I always use (have always used) the Alt-D key combination, with the added bonus that it also works to highlight the path bar in Windows Explorer. Plus it’s a left-handed key combination, which is handy if my right hand is on the mouse.

Re:I love the awesome bar

[TangoMargarine]

If you turn it off, it stops giving any suggestions at all. It sounds like the problem isn't that some people don't want suggestions, it's just that they want them only based on the beginning of the URL they typed, like all the browsers used to do five years ago. Unfortunately, no easy option exists to set it to do that.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow buddy you're childhood is really coming through today.

Google told me to get it -

[buckadude]

After you get it, try out - http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/ I think it's neat anyhow and and I had never used a WebGL app prior. Awesome stuff.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moran for not posting ac.

and yer easilly trolled.

What will they break this time?

[ToreTS]

I wonder what part of Firefox's functionality will be arbitrarily changed this time? I always delay upgrading until they cut off security updates for the old version, and every time I finally upgrade there is some part of the application that works differently, and I need to google some arcane config setting to put it back the way I like it.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit300]

"you're" cowardice never ceased to come through.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[ThatMegathronDude]

Will you stop posting? You don't contribute anything to this discussion.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[higuita]

show me a system/big apps without bugs... the main problem is that in closed apps you dont even see the bugs and most people dont even report then, so they stay hidden for years (are you listen MS!!)

the fact that you can count bugs doesnt mean they are all the in the same level of importance, many of then might even be enhancement bugs

but hey, if you dont like FF, use other browsers, as long they respect the standards, its fine!

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[harmonise]

A neat demo, to be sure, but it's not compiling. It's just interpreting Python into JavaScript which is itself interpreted. I would much rather see the ability to write in the language of my choice and have that compiled into bytecode which I would then serve to clients. That bytecode would be what is executed. Then we can use whatever language is best for the job.

Flash Graphics Glitch in Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

So when are the Firefox people going to fix the graphics bug that's been around since the beta 7 prereleases that causes Flash videos not to play properly? They work in Safari, they work in Firefox in full-screen mode, but in a Firefox window they simply won't play. 64-bit Firefox + 64-bit Flash = fail.

Re:Flash Graphics Glitch in Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

The beta doesn't even have 64-bit availability for non-mac systems. And that is a fail. No binaries for Linux 64-bit and Windows 64-bit. OS X support requires 10.5. I still use 10.3...

Re:Flash Graphics Glitch in Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

The nightly builds are more up to date, and they do have 64-bit availability:
Linux 64-bit binary
Windows 64-bit binary
Surely you knew at the time you purchased a Mac that Steve Jobs wants you to pay again and again to stay current?

Beta 8 Download link

[bodino]

The download link on the original page is old. It reads http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-4.0b7&os=win&lang=en-US, so just change the "7" to an "8" and voi-la! A download link like so http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-4.0b8&os=win&lang=en-US . Those from other locales may choose a diff lang or OS.

Re:Beta 8 Download link

[Anonymous Coward]

The link still says beta 7 because they aren't ready for people to download beta 8 yet. That's why the beta 8 page on the wiki says "Hi! We're glad you're interested in Firefox 4 Beta 8 - it's not quite ready yet."

"It hurts when I do this, doctor..."

[slyborg]

Figure out what the plugin is and stop using it. Fixed.

This is why a lot of app developers hate plugins, etc. because their product gets blamed for some cute "dancing reindeer" add-on that leaks memory and now their product "totally sucks!"

If you think Chrome will solve your problem, you will be sad. The sandboxing is to prevent a plug crash from taking down the whole browser, but it's perfectly fine for it to consume memory. And Chrome, particularly the latest dev build, is a resource monster already. As more plugins accumulate for Chrome, all of these complaints will migrate to Chrome...circle of life, I suppose.

Re:"It hurts when I do this, doctor..."

[parallel_prankster]

Agreed which is why I have not moved out of Firefox and also mentioned about better plugin control needed on firefox than saying it sucks.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[characterZer0]

Then stop using HTML/CSS/JavaScript for applications and use Java Web Start. Write in Java, Ruby (JRuby), Python (JPython), Scala, or JavaScript (Rhino).

Not out yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

The beta isn't officially out yet, the news site jumped the gun...

Re:Not out yet!

[rudy_wayne]

That's odd. I downloaded beta 8 within minutes after this story was posted.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[harmonise]

But then it wouldn't be web pages.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[devent]

So true. Can't Mozialla just port the JavaVM into the browser? That way we could use JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Scala, Lisp, and Java as a web language. Mozilla just need to add some web stuff into the JavaVM like DOM so the JavaVM can manipulate the HTML.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Though you possibly won't read this anymore, I can understand why he called you a moron, though I wouldn't phrase it that harshly.

You seem to have no clue about open source software development. That's perfectly OK by itself and I'm going to give you a few hints, but first let me tell you that clueless people who display their ignorance proudly are annoying. And as such a person you have presented yourself in your original comment.

The most direct explanation is that most of those bugs were not fixed, and aren't even needed to be. They were "closed", usually by an automatic bug updater.
If you watch the bug tracker of any bigger FOSS project, you will see a huge load of bugs getting filed. Yet in fact, most of those are either duplicates, not reproducible/confirmable by anyone or the author doesn't exactly know what went wrong in which software package and filed a report somewhere. All of those bugs get marked as "closed" or synonymously "fixed", month by month.
Obviously, there will be more of them the more popular a project is. Also obviously, they are in no way indicative of the quality of a project, only of it's popularity.
I say "obviously" because it is so for us who participate in FOSS development and use bug trackers daily. Then comes someone with little insight into the matter and starts making condescending assertations as _moronic_ (to refer to the GP) as "The former president of the USA, J. W. Bush made a funny rhetorical mistake at some point... and that's why all Americans are linguistic retards and I don't want to talk to them."
It's just annoying, really.

Hope that helped clear things up a little bit ;)

Mozilla/Seamonkey has a new beta too

[theaveng]

we_fast

I've found that having a fast Java(script) engine doesn't matter when your laptop has a 600 megahertz CPU, or slower ~2001 era hard drive. It sits there and momentarily-freezes while the page loads. The code is fast but too CPU intensive. (shrug). Puppy Lucid 10.04 Linux has a few nice browsers for limited, older computers like FirePuppy (very simple) and Non-google Chromium (small memory footprint).

SeaMonkey Navigator beta 2 is scheduled to release this week too (although it might get postponed 'til after the christmas break).

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[characterZer0]

So?

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[harmonise]

So lots of web applications and interactivity are moving to HTML 5 and JavaScript and companies like Apple and Google are pushing hard to move things in that direction. Some devices, like the Google ChromeOS laptop, are just a browser with no capability for Flash and Java. We're going to see more of that.

Believe me, I agree with you that Java would be a better solution, but it's not really an option now and probably won't be one at all in the near future.

dodgy extention compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I know its up to the developers of each extension to make their product compatible with the latest (beta) build of firefox, therefore Mozilla is not entirely at fault but....

After Installing FF 4 B 8, I found that 36 out of 44 extension (all worked on V3.6) were not compatible. No beta playing for me until more of of my extensions work.

Is this a chicken/egg scenario and I'm being impatient, or are all the developers not bothered to keep updating their software in line with Mozilla's upgrade plans?

Re:dodgy extention compatibility

[rudy_wayne]

I know its up to the developers of each extension to make their product compatible with the latest (beta) build of firefox, therefore Mozilla is not entirely at fault but....

I strongly disagree. It is Mozilla's fault. Since the earliest days of the original Mozilla browser they have completely ignored backwards compatibility. Every new version breaks most extensions. Just going from FF4 beta 7 to beta 8 required me to update 2 extensions. Some of the major extensions (like Adblock) get updated quickly. Others get updated more slowly and many are abandoned and never updated at all, in which case, you're screwed. Sometimes you can hack the version number on an extension and get it to work, but not always.

But here's the point. Except for the occasional program that does low level stuff (typically anti-virus and disk defrag programs) I have very rarely had any problems with software not working when I move from one version of Windows to another. I have old software dating back to the days of Windows 95 and it runs just fine on Windows 7 x64 because Windows has a stable API for writing software and as long as you follow the rules your program will usually run on any version of Windows. And there's no reason why the Mozilla developers can't do the same thing. There's no reason why they can't create a stable API or framework for extensions so that any extension that follows the API will work across different versions of Firefox. For some reason they just have no interest in doing this.

Re:dodgy extention compatibility

[BZ]

You may be interested in https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/ which is precisely such a stable API.

Of course, being stable makes it more limited. It can't totally rejigger your browser window, say; if it could it would break when the design of that window changed, right?

Now will extension authors write to the stable API or continue to do the Windows equivalent of writing custom drivers as part of their app? Who knows.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[clone52431]

A neat demo, to be sure, but it's not compiling. It's just interpreting Python into JavaScript which is itself interpreted.

If it’s done all at once, it’s compiled. What’s more, the Javascript itself is probably being executed by something between an interpreter and a compiler. The boundaries are so indistinct anymore in this particular region that your making a point of it is not only wrong but more or less meaningless even if it was correct.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[BZ]

> Will it finally support languages other than JavaScript for client side programming?

No.

In fact, we're _removing_ such support. We supported using python for chrome (Firefox browser ui, not google's browser) programming for years, and no one used it. It's just a performance drag on the javascript and C++ side of things, so it's being removed.

The fact is, supporting multiple languages in a single runtime without leaking and without nasty performance hits on both is not really all that feasible. Given that, and the near-zero amount of actual use such functionality would get, based on our experience with chrome, it's not worth building it in....

Re:1415 bugs?!

[BZ]

In the case of Mozilla, all issues in the issue tracker are called "bugs". That includes feature requests, requests to give someone access to the version control system, tickets that track bumping the version number from "4.0b7" to "4.0b8", etc, etc.

So you end up with a pretty inflated bug count if you just count the "bugs".

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[clone52431]

IIRC it’s also possible to write the bulk of an extension in C++ and then hook it into the browser chrome with Javascript, or something along those lines.

But this discussion isn’t really about extensions, it’s about web-based applications...

Re:1415 bugs?!

[BZ]

> 1415 bugs in a mature release of a spec based media rendering engine?

That "spec based" thing...

One simple issue is that the specs are not stable in many cases (even in cases when they exist; in many cases they don't exist). There were dozens of bugs in one small component (form controls) that had to be fixed because the spec has changed yet again. Similar things for the indexeddb spec, parsing, etc, etc.

I mean.... have you tried implementing these specs? Or even finding a stable version of them?

Re:1415 bugs?!

[drcheap]

If you file a bug each time you want to change the color of a bikeshed...

"That's not a bug, it's a feature." -- Bill Gates, 1981

Re:1415 bugs?!

[drcheap]

no one can defend a corporation requiring 10 years to fix logical failures in their flagship product utilized by millions to process credit transactions.

Hate to break it to you, but browsers do not proces credit card transactions. Sure, people use them as a tool to submit their credit card information, but it's just (one of) the messenger(s).

Wow...client side credit card processing...scary thought!

Fixed Buglist:

[betona]

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b8/releasenotes/buglist.html

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[BZ]

> IIRC it's also possible to write the bulk of an extension in C++ and then hook it into the > browser chrome with Javascript, or something along those lines.

That's not quite the same thing. In that case the C++ would be running into its own world. What Firefox used to support is just putting:

in your XUL, which would run just like JS runs in chrome, with complete access to the DOM, etc. Again, no one used it.

> But this discussion isn't really about extensions, it's about web-based applications...

Right; there's just not much evidence that if any one browser (but not others) were to support this then anyone would use it. In fact, there's evidence to the contrary: even in the limited context of extensions, where compat with other browsers is not a concern, no one used it.

So why would a browser do this? It's a competitive disadvantage (since it slows down C++ and JS DOM manipulation, increases memory usage, etc) to be the first mover on this, it's a lot of work to do even a half-assed job and a _lot_ of work to do it "right", and there is no payoff for doing it...

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[BZ]

Er... I keep forgetting that Slashdot's "plain old text" isn't. What you could put in was:

    <script type="application/python" src="my-python.py"></script>

blame Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Windows itself is part of the problem,
Windows happily uses the swap too often.
Windows itself is bloated, adding to the swapping.
Windows-programs are..you get the idea.

On the FF side i found that anti-phishing and anti-malware settings downloads
alot. Some have reported many Gigs of data!

If you've got fast internet try lowering the cache somewhat.
(I run Squid on my server so all my browsers in my LAN have
  really low cache setting, they starts and runs better)

There's lots of more bloat in FF,
Less ads
Less cookies

Less updates
app.update.interval;2505600 =29days Def=86400s=1day
extensions.update.interval;2592000 =30days Def=86400s

and on and on. Seems all browsers comes with maximum stupid-
settings on by default.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[clone52431]

I know. And you could also compile Python to a .dll and probably hook that in. And it is a whole different ball game, I realise. I was just pointing out that you can already use different languages client-side, if you’re talking about extensions. There are just a few other hoops you have to jump through to do it.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit313]

"enhancement bugs"... said the programmer full of excuses.

a bug is a bug. it is not a feature request. it is only an enhancement as so much as it is a removal of a logical FAILURE.

why would i ever use a browser 10 years into a production cycle that continues to have thousands of bugs identified? why would anyone?

but hey, if your mother named you "higuita" why wouldn't you tell people that is your name, "its" fine!

you're an idiot.

Why wait for beta releases?

[kehren77]

I've been running the nightly release version for a few months now without issues*. Very fast, great new features.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

* I don't run many add-ons so your mileage may vary.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit317]

ur mum's face seem to have no clue about open source software development.

i understand open source software development completely... unskilled developers provide more bugs than features, and then frequent this internet web site chat room message board to whine about it while begging for praise and adoption.

keep committing those bugs... you're doing a noble service. ;)

so much hate for the awesome bar

[Gravis Zero]

if you are linux or 64bit OS user like me, you will notice the article doesnt have a links for any of them.

save some time and use the awesome bar. type something like firefox nightly builds, press enter and bam! the nightly build site comes up.

please note that if you constantly clear your browser history due to potentially embarrassing browsing history, you are inhibiting your ability to use the awesome bar.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit319]

actually, you end up looking like a fool proclaiming your flagship product is riddled with bugs.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit320]

considering i have 20 years experience in web development, i most certainly have implemented them, and find such implementations trivial.

there aren't 1415 form controls... there aren't even 1415 attributes.

the firefox codebase is quite obviously littered with logical failures.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit301]

actually, it's "just" (one of) the EXPLOITABLE messenger(s).

but why would mozilla care about such things with so many other obvious scapegoats to point fingers at........ right?

if a messenger doesn't process messages for delivery, THEN IT ISN'T A MESSENGER.

you're an idiot... but you don't realize it... scary thought!

did your mother name you "drcheap"? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[BZ]

> i most certainly have implemented them,

You've written an HTML parser? A JavaScript interpreter? A JPEG decoder?

Do you and I just disagree on the meaning of the word "implement" here?

> there aren't 1415 form controls... there aren't even 1415 attributes.

Did you miss the part where I said that form controls are a _small_ module that contributed a few dozen make-work bugs to the total?

> the firefox codebase is quite obviously littered with logical failures.

Yep. It sure is. As is every single large codebase of any sort I've looked at.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit302]

yes, i have written HTML parsers... it's really REALLY hard to utilize any of regular expression stream tokenizers... it's not trivial at all. it's ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE. one time, i only wrote 1399 bugs while attempting it. mozilla bested me.

so "dozens" turns to "few" under scrutiny... i'm sure there was at least 1 bug attributable to form control spec changes.

you've obviously never seen any codebase that i maintain. there is a reason mozilla provides their products free of charge... what could that reason be? could delivering a broken product ever serve to benefit such a company?

yep. it sure could.

did your mother name you "BZ"? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit311]

i've written fast fourier transforms for JPEG images and every other image type complete with a suite of image manipulation tools... i did that when i was 16, over 15 years ago.

i architected custom languages with their own interpreters that power web server platforms which serve as their own operating system to power large scale content distribution networks.

i assure you, i know all of the reasons why everything mozilla is doing is broken and wrong.

bragging about 1400+ bugs existing is barely scratching the surface.

ever since "plugin manager"

[chronoss2010]

FF blows at slashdot, techdirt, cbc youtube, youname it with crap load times

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's a consequence of lower traffic, or due to behind-the-scenes tweaking of the moderation system, but is anybody else noticing more posters like this Michael character flooding discussions with nuisance posts, and not being moderated away like they are supposed to be, and like they used to be?

It seems like if slashdot acquires a handful more posters like this guy, or spun, at this point, they would basically destroy the site. Moderation isn't catching them.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[BZ]

> it's really REALLY hard to utilize any of regular expression stream tokenizers

Uh... you can't tokenize HTML (correctly at least) with regular expressions. If you're trying to, you just lose. If you're doing it for security reasons, you _really_ lose.

> so "dozens" turns to "few" under scrutiny..

Uh... "dozens" and "a few dozen" are in fact pretty much the same last I checked. "few" and "a few dozen" are not. Please do read what I wrote instead of just trolling?

> i'm sure there was at least 1 bug attributable to form control spec changes.

Absolutely. ;)

> you've obviously never seen any codebase that i maintain

Clearly.

> did your mother name you "BZ"?

Nope, but it provides a convenient handle for Slashdot and irc and whatnot, being short. It's not like I make a big secret over who I am, exactly. Here; I'll even help you out:

    http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=bz+mozilla

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[kripkenstein]

A neat demo, to be sure, but it's not compiling. It's just interpreting Python into JavaScript which is itself interpreted.

Just to clarify, CPython is compiled (not interpreted) from C into JavaScript. (Then Python is interpreted inside that, just as CPython interprets code normally.)

The first step is compilation, since C is actually translated into JavaScript. There isn't a runtime that interprets it. Unless you mean the JavaScript engine itself, which interprets the JavaScript into which it's compiled - but that engine too, in modern browsers, will compile JavaScript into machine code, and not interpret it.

Anyhow, maybe that's what you meant and were just being brief, sorry if so. I just wanted to clarify that for other people reading.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit313]

you're an ignorant hypocrite. i'm sure your proclamation is appreciated by whoever it is you think you're talking to.

you're an idiot.

slashdot = stagnated.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit313]

Uh............ i didn't say the tokenization was done entirely with regular expressions... i said regular expressions were utilized... perhaps you don't understand the difference. i would not be surprised if you didn't. please do remain an idiot?

if you really are in any way associated with the mozilla development process, it's even more clear to me why they are accumulating so much broken code full of logical failures in their flagship products.

you're an idiot.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Knuckles]

Dude, give it up. I don't know what's up with that MichaelKristopeit30x guy, but you notice that he posts from at least 5 accounts, yes? Check out these accounts' posting histories.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[BZ]

I did not in fact notice that, no. And I gave up, indeed. ;) Thanks for the good advice!

Tabs...

[God of Lemmings]

So, when are they going to fix the usability issue with the changing tab width? For some time people have been complaining about the inability to put the close button on the left side of the tab. They of course refuse to do this, but they still haven't gotten that the issue is really that people just want the close button of the next tab to line up under the mouse every time you close a tab. For those who don't what i'm talking about. Download Chrome, open up enough tabs so that the tabs have to shrink to fit the window. Now close a few. You will notice that in Chrome the tabs don't resize until you move the mouse away from the button. FF4 unfortunately resizes immediately on closing, making it a pain to close more than one or two tabs at a time.

Re:Tabs...

[clone52431]

For some time people have been complaining about the inability to put the close button on the left side of the tab.

Tab Mix Plus has that option.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

you = moron

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit308]

ur mum's face = moron.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

I wonder if we'll ever get FF2 functionality back

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of Firefox 2.x's URL bar behavior: type in some letters, and I get every site in my history who's url (minus the www) starts with those letters, sorted by frequency of use. Will we ever get that kind of option in newer versions of Firefox? I've been through this with FF3 before; there's ways to make it only search through the history (not bookmarks, etc.), but no way to have it sort by frequency, and no way to get it to ignore the www in URLs. That was awhile ago, though. Maybe there's a plugin that does this now?

Re:Javascript is not the problem, it's the interfa

[Compaqt]

Especially when it's restarting, I've wondered why it has to try to load huge numbers of tabs all at once. Why not load 3-4 tabs, then the next 3-4, etc?

You often have a large number of tabs at startup because you click on Restart after installing an extension, and you had tabs open.

Btw, what happens to the disk cache re: those tabs? When FF is running, it caches pages so they won't have to be downloaded again. So why does it download again when you restart? Why not read it off the disk?

Check Kraken and 'darkroom'

[akayani]

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org

As is often the case benchmarks don't tell the whole story.

If you run Kracken and compare the results with Google (I'm using FF4 b9pre Minefield)

Now look specifically at the score for digital darkroom (image manipulation)

darkroom: 6.07x as fast Chrome - 1705.3ms +/- 1.6% Firefox - 281.1ms +/- 0.7% significant

Now click on the hyper link and check the actual test and try image rotation. Behold Chrome fails to remove the original image and rotates the new image over the top of the original. So not only is FF 6X faster it also works.

K-Meleon

[luk3Z]

I'm using k-meleon which is much faster than FF and also have extensions :)

Re:1415 bugs?!

[TangoMargarine]

actually, it's "just" (one of) the EXPLOITABLE messenger(s).

You're not an OpenBSD user by any chance, are you? Because even they've been on the /. front page recently about a few bugs that they had to fix. Any project with more than a few lines of code is bound to have problems, exponentially more as the LOC increase.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[Inda]

Just call each other's mothers fags and the flames will end.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[oreaq]

20 years experience? You started "web development" in 1990? What kind of webs did you develop back then?

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[PybusJ]

While the python on that page is interpreted. The python interpreter itself is compiled from C to javascript using emscripten.

You can compile any other languages supported by LLVM to javascript. Alternatively, if you want to compile Java to javascript, use GWT which has been doing that for years. These aren't the only examples, it is becoming a popular strategy.

This is close to what you want, except that machine generated javascript has replaced your bytecode. Having a defined virtual machine and bytecode on the web was tried with the JVM, but didn't work out so well. Persuading the world to try again won't work; improving the browsers javascript implementations (and extending the JS spec) is more feasible and reaches much the same goal.

Listen to Brendan Eich on byte code in the browser in his podcast.

Just Don't Uninstall It

[Toad-san]

I downloaded and installed the "pre-release" version a week ago. Immediately experienced a BSOD (something related to an NVidia graphics driver). Rebooted, uninstalled.

Fired up the never-uninstalled Firefox v3.x still on my system. And guess what? All my bookmarks, favorites, GONE. My history: GONE. My add-ons: GONE!

Damned uninstall nuked my entire Firefox installation (except for the actual folder and executables themselves).

DAMNED good thing I had duplicates on my home system (thanks to the Sync addon). Lesson learned (again): don't even think of trying a Mozilla / Firefox BETA.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit324]

you're an idiot if you believe that. keep pushing your pathetic excuses for your logical failures.

considering every line of code doesn't interact with every other line, it's quite obvious your claims of exponentiality are completely ridiculous.

you're an idiot.

did your mother name you "TangoMargarine"? why do you cower behind a chosen pseudonym? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit328]

i bring only THE TRUTH.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit329]

mainly quickbasic and pascal on platforms i designed myself.

Been doing SSD or RamDisk usage w/ browsers 4 yrs

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, I noted what you're stating, as back as far as 1996 (per my subject-line) when the same basic ideas were used by EEC Systems (superspeed.com) for placement @ Microsoft Tech Ed 2000-2002, 2 yrs. in a ROW no less, & in its hardest category (SQLServer performance enhancement) via ideas & articles I wrote for them, while I was on paid contract for improving their SuperCache I/II product line by up to 40% also (SSD's/Ramdisks are useful, & not just for db work, but also for end-user "more mundane" tasks, like moving all the things you noted to software ramdisks OR better still, physical SSD's (I use a CENATEK Rocketdrive 2gb unit + a GIGABYTE IRAM for that too)).

Here's an old example proof of my statement:

http://forums.windowsforum.org/index.php?s=b7615bf35dda72a9c6ae6abe9d3ed51f&showtopic=28614&st=0&p=273039&#entry273039

& here's a LOT of others (I've been involved with posting what you have to others on this note, for ages, in other words):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22APK%22+and+%22Ramdrive%22&btnG=Google+Search

and/or

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22Ramdrive%22&btnG=Search

---

I also go a bit above & beyond what you state... how? Well, I even place my pagefile.sys in Windows on an SSD (CENATEK ROCKETDRIVE PC-133 SDRAM 2gb), & my Linux swap partition onto an SSD also (GIGABYTE IRAM 1gb partition of 4gb total)...

I used to do this before that too, albeit w/ software Ramdisks (I even built a software ramdisk back in the early Windows NT 3.51 - Windows 2000 days).

YOU'RE ON THE "RIGHT TRACK", BECAUSE IT ALL WORKS FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE!

APK

P.S.=> ONLY HASSLE I'VE BEEN SEEING LATELY, IS WITH MOZILLA "MINEFIELD" (FF beta really): I've tried moving its diskcache & CAN'T!!!

(It works fine for others, as I do it for IE (via Internet Options GUI), Opera (via Opera's .ini files edited), & Chrome (via commandline parms here))

However, using what FireFox 3.6x can still do, via prefs.js/user.js edits, adding these settings:

user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", true);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.directory", Z:\\TEMP);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory", Z:\\TEMP);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 1048576);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run", false);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value", 1048576);

BUT, it doesn't seem to "take" & work in Mozilla minefield lately to move its cache locations, & that's the browser version this article on /. here is about (any ideas?) ... apk

Re:1415 bugs?!

[after.fallout.34t98e]

If you haven't gotten the memo here yet, MichaelKristopeit### is trolling many different parts of this page (roughly 10% of the comments here are his).

He has proceeded through several sets of insults via multiple different posts from multiple users. He is getting by the moderation system a little bit by the aspect that he is a new user and thus has neutral karma. I think he gets a new user id (increasing the number) whenever his karma becomes negative so that his trolls continue to show up. I am pretty sure that there is a way to apply a negative bonus to new users so that you could avoid seeing him and those like him, but that would cause you to stop seeing other users who are saying something useful but do not post often.

This person is exploiting a weakness in the current moderation system. I don't know how it could be improved to get rid of him without adversely affecting other users. One way to do it would be to make all new users wait a period of time before they are allowed to post. That would raise the level of commitment that this person would need to continue his trolling but might not stop it. It also may have too much of an impact on other users that the /. devs may not want to implement it.

Make the AwesomeBar usable

[DragonHawk]

Install the "OldBar" Extension to change the "look" back to the old way:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Make the following about:config changes to get the "feel" closer to the old way:

browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped = True
browser.urlbar.matchBehavior = 2

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit327]

all of the music you made is horrible. it will continue to be horrible forever.

Re:1415 bugs?!

[MichaelKristopeit330]

it was not musical in nature. it was soulless ignorance.

whoever is responsible should cease their attempts of auditory conveyance.

Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, there's evidence to the contrary: even in the limited context of extensions, where compat with other browsers is not a concern, no one used it.

(I realize I'm replying to a >1 week old comment as AC; just felt like this needed clearing up...)

No one used it because it was not actually shipped. You could not build a Firefox extension with Python and have it actually run anywhere - there was no Python runtime that shipped with Firefox. The only people to actually build a shipping product with Python was Komodo, though I have no idea about the language distribution of their extensions either.

The history with Mozilla is basically only things that Mozilla.org (Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox, in chronological order) cared about actually work. Even if you do manage to get things checked in upstream, you get kicked back out if you're not the right project. In the PyXPCOM case, it got jettisoned in the CVS->HG move even though it was less of a standalone project than NSPR or SpiderMonkey. Of course, you know all this anyway...