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Firefox 4 Beta 8 Up

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the not-the-fish dept.

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."

10 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. The only question I have is by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:The only question I have is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.)

    2. Re:The only question I have is by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. URL Bar by TheL0ser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:URL Bar by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:URL Bar by Anaerin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. Firefox had its chance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Is "Beta" an appropriate label? by revlayle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.)

  5. Re:How Many Beta's? by BatGnat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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......

  6. 1415 bugs fixed... by lowlymarine · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...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.