Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

46 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 Wordplay · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:The only question I have is by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:The only question I have is by trrichard · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    4. 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.)

    5. Re:The only question I have is by augustm · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    6. Re:The only question I have is by couchslug · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
    7. Re:The only question I have is by damien_kane · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:The only question I have is by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      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?

    9. Re:The only question I have is by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:The only question I have is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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

    11. 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.

    12. Re:The only question I have is by BZ · · Score: 2

      > 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!

    13. Re:The only question I have is by YttriumOxide · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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)

      --
      My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
      Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
  2. I like it by hansamurai · · Score: 2

    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.
  3. 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 rudy_wayne · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:URL Bar by firewrought · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      -1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
    4. Re:URL Bar by kripkenstein · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:URL Bar by fotbr · · Score: 2

      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.

    6. Re:URL Bar by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
    7. 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.

    8. Re:URL Bar by kripkenstein · · Score: 2

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

    9. Re:URL Bar by kripkenstein · · Score: 2

      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.

    10. Re:URL Bar by trawg · · Score: 2

      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.

    11. Re:URL Bar by siddesu · · Score: 2

      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.

  4. fine-tuned add-ons manager by denis-The-menace · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2

      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.

    2. Re:fine-tuned add-ons manager by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      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.

  5. Re:1415 bugs?! by rudy_wayne · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. and it's slow by electrosoccertux · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. Is "Beta" an appropriate label? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 2

    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".

    1. 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.)

  8. No it's not by bartok · · Score: 2

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

  9. Re:How Many Beta's? by perryizgr8 · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
  10. Will it support languages other than JavaScript? by harmonise · · Score: 2

    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.
  11. 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......

  12. Re:How Many Beta's? by Soul-Burn666 · · Score: 2

    Firefox 4 goes up to 11!

    --
    ^_^
  13. JS Benchmarks by Khopesh · · Score: 2

    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.
  14. Re:1415 bugs?! by ThatMegathronDude · · Score: 2

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

  15. Re:1415 bugs fixed... by clone52431 · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
  16. Re:Will it support languages other than JavaScript by BZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > 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....

  17. Re:1415 bugs?! by BZ · · Score: 2

    > 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

  18. Re:How Many Beta's? by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    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?

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  19. Re:How Many Beta's? by after.fallout.34t98e · · Score: 2

    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