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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."
I think I'll catch the 26th Beta before the final release.
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
September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking and nothing but talking we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.
I cannot sleep, so I will try writing down some of the thoughts which are flying through my head.
It is not safe to talk here. The walls are quite thin, and the neighbors might wonder at a latenight conference. Besides, George and Katherine are already asleep. Only Henry and I are still awake, and he’s just staring at the ceiling.
I am really uptight. l am so jittery I can barely sit still. And I’m exhausted. I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning, when George phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it’s after midnight now. I’ve been keyed up and on the move all day.
But at the same time I’m exhilarated. We have finally acted! How long we will be able to continue defying the System, no one knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Gun Raids two years ago.
What a blow that was to us! And how it shamed us! All that brave talk by patriots, "The government will never take my guns away," and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.
On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that there were still so many of us who had guns then, nearly 18 months after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn’t able to act more harshly against us after the Gun Raids.
I’ll never forget that terrible day: November 9, 1989. They knocked on my door at five in the morning. I was completely unsuspecting as I got up to see who it was.
Read more...
how many bugs did mozilla choose to not fix?
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.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
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)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
The download links are still pointing to beta 7.
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
The main reason I run FF is the wealth of addons.
Will 4.0 break compatibility?
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.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Can't migrate til that is compatible.
(Yeah I heard the news.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I thought Firefox 5 was released last week.
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.
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
i am running firefox 4.0b9pre which translates to firefox 4.0 beta 9. how is beta 8 news???
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
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.
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.
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.
Then stop using HTML/CSS/JavaScript for applications and use Java Web Start. Write in Java, Ruby (JRuby), Python (JPython), Scala, or JavaScript (Rhino).
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The beta isn't officially out yet, the news site jumped the gun...
But then it wouldn't be web pages.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
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.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
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).
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
So?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
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?
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.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
> 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....
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...
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b8/releasenotes/buglist.html
> 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...
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>
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.
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.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
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.
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
FF blows at slashdot, techdirt, cbc youtube, youname it with crap load times
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.
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.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
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?
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?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
I'm using k-meleon which is much faster than FF and also have extensions :)
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
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.
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.
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
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
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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...