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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."

14 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 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.)

    3. 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

    4. 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."
    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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.

  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 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.

    3. 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.
    4. 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. 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.)