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Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month
Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."
Wake me up when the final build comes out.
Been using the beta. No real complaints, seems a bit snappier, but on the whole no big whoop. If anyone knows how to get the status bar back that would be nice. And for some reason they always put find at the bottom of the page, which is totally not intuitive since users enter info at the top with the search and address bars...
Wasn't this supposed to be the answer to Chrome - yet Chrome has shipped several iterations in the time it took them to get from 3 to 4? I think Firefox is on beta 10 or whatever. For a while, I maintained that I would switch back to Firefox once it matched the speed and minimalist interface that Chrome had, as I didn't like using a browser from Google. Now? Not so sure anymore - I'm so used to Chrome and it fits my workflow so well. It will take a lot to get me back.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
I've never reverted a version before, always liked the new one, but with FF 4 and it's lack of status bar and lack of SSL related security notices and missing right-click menu options, I've got to ask what the hell are they doing? Mozilla seem to be trying to dumb down FF and are removing useful features in the process. Double click blank space for a new tab is gone, right-click -> new tab is gone.
It's slower to use now because quick options and quick information have been removed. Also, hovering over URLs now squeezes the URL to be visited into the URL box with the current URL, unreadable light coloured fonts have been chosen and for most URLs you can barely read a fraction of the URL - It's dreadful. Plus right-click -> block image has been removed.
What next? Quit trying to copy Chrome and IE if I wanted to use those corporate straitjackets I would be.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
FF2 was quite the sleek browser, but once they got a good market share and user appreciation, it became bloatware. Perhaps this is a chance to step back to the old "model?"
Perhaps you didn't notice all the bloat that snuck in with the 1.x to 2 transition. My expectations were so thoroughly killed, the 2 to 3 change was barley even a bump in the road.
Master password? Depends on your computer's living situation, of course.
With "Panorama" aka "Tab Candy" aka "Bolted on tab management feature that only power users need", I'm not so sure. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
but once they got a good market share and user appreciation, it became bloatware.
Some people call it "bloat", other people call it features that they asked for and find useful.
Seriously, if you want a stripped down / light-weight browser, there are other options.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You'll have to get addons for both. They want to phase out the status bar, and they figured not providing that functionality was for the best. The titlebar is part of an ongoing WONTFIX, because they think Tabs on Top deserves more love. Thankfully, tired of people's complaints, they whipped together this addon that does the trick: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/221514/ (Vista+)
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
I see what you did there...
Ditto. Fed up with Firefox causing the beach ball on my Mac too many times (I am very sure this was caused by Flash, though) and other weird things like Javascript stopped working until I restarted the browser and page print outs that were cut-off I tried out Chrome. Once I installed similar extensions like the ones I loved on Firefox I don't think I'll ever switch back.
For a while my FF (first beta7 now beta8) has hanged on/before startup. After I click the FF icon it takes about half a minute until the Windows appear. It does happen with a new profile for a different user and safe mode doesn't change anything.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Does the new Firefox have its menu bar missing just like Chrome and IE8 do? 'cuz I'm a Firefox user and I really want to have all of the browser's configuration and management features jammed into some weird little button in the corner like my Chrome and IE8 using friends do. It's so awesome when the File, Edit, etc. menus that are present in every other application on your desktop go missing in your browser, and I want Firefox to suck that way too!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
There are a couple of status bar add-ons you can pick up, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/ worked for me.
I just went back to FF from Chrome. Reasons: significant closing of the performance gap and about:config. I really, really like about:config.
"Release candidate" means "release this version if it's good enough, otherwise produce another RC", not "something random to put out before a deadline".
It's enough to make me miss IE5. Sleek, simple, didn't have any notion of the unnecessary Web2.0 shit. Optimising the browsing of a web of information was always a lofty goal for a web browser, I guess.
I know you can get an add-on to replace it.
But that requires each and every user to look for and install something that should already be there!
For the developers to take the status bar completely out... that's just ridiculous.
At the very least, put a little check box in the options page to turn it back on.
I made a big blog post about using Firefox 4 and a bunch of other things you can do to help make it better. Most of you in this crowd can skip to Item 3, I wrote it for users who are not technical.
http://bryanquigley.com/uncategorized/try-the-new-firefox-beta
Or in just one sentence, turn on the surveys to automatically submit, and install/run Grafx Bot - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/200733/.
And in related news, I also would love to see Duck Duck Go be included as one of the search engines...
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/topics/include_duck_duck_go_as_option_by_default_in_search_box
Well, the latest Beta runs a lot worse, slower, unstable than the latest 3.6.13, so unless things change quickly .....
How about they just admit they're trying to copy Chrome and just make it an option instead of forcing it on people?
Thanks Mozilla.
I'm using minefield for all day-to-day stuff. Only issue seems to be related to 64-bit java (stuff that doesn't work with 64-bit java even on firefox 3.6.13).
Downloading daily upgrades is just a matter of Help->About Minefield->Check for upgrades. Upgrades use 1 to 2MB of download. Very easy to surf the updates.
I've been running Chrome for about a year now (maybe less) as my primary browser. It's small and snappy enough that it suits my older hardware better than FF 3 does. I use FF when my primary concern is security, rather than speed and convenience. Unfortunately, I've been getting a bit frustrated at Chrome lately too. Google keeps releasing patches and updates, which is fine for security. But it seems like the last few iterations of Chrome have made my Adblocking, Flashblocking, and javascript settings nearly useless. Sure, some of the more obnoxious ads are getting blocked, but even with my AdBlock extensions and a few good, reliable blocklist subscriptions, I am finding more and more ads in Chrome than I do on the same pages in FF with AB+ installed.
To top it off, the most recent Chrome update seems to have gummed up Flash in my browser somehow. I am not sure how. I will probably just need to reconfigure something (though I have no idea what yet). But many flash applications seem to have buttons disabled, or some other such thing. I liked Chrome because it was simple, quick, and convenient. But with AdBlocking becoming increasingly useless, I'd much prefer to switchback to FF. Here's hoping FF 4 is sleek enough to not lag out my 6 year old hardware.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Just use Lynx if that's what you want. Meanwhile, the rest of us will appreciate most features that Mozilla put into their browsers because most of the time they are useful.
For "Feature Bloat". I agree but only because I have a similar feature built into my desktop twinned with "Open All in Tabs" from bookmarks. I have finally just taken it off the toolbar having never used it, but for the life of me I cannot think of anything else that I would call bloat.
In a 'pre-emptive removal of unknown exploits' similar to what Microsoft did when they released IE6.
Fortunately the overbite addon exists, but does not seem compatible with recent Beta versions.
They want to phase out the status bar, and they figured not providing that functionality was for the best
Wow, that's simply awful. The status bar is there for a reason. Do they really want people following links with even less information than they have now? If my browser is stalling out trying to load a page, how will I know what domain to block?
Looks like Mozilla is continuing to dumb down its user interface. Is there a browser around that targets the geek market? One for those of us who want more information and more control?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
WORKSFORME.
I run ff4b8, and I find it quicker, more stable, and generally snappier than previous stable releases.
And I use a lot of addons.
Its NOT the seamonkey model; unlike opera, mozilla, seamonkey etc, it doesnt have built in mail, torrent, ftp (at least not worth mentioning), an HTTP server (opera...), newsreader, etc.
Its JUST a browser, like its always been.
And I raise a motion that all complaining that 3.0 is too slow and bloaty, should be forced to use version 1.0 or 1.5 or 2.0, and see just how slow they really are when used with modern expectations of heavy duty JS, 30 some tabs, and zillions of extensions. I seem to recall an AWFUL lot of complaining from days of yore about 1.0 and 1.5's memory usage and bloat.
What is it they say, "the grass is always greener..."?
Addons cant really do anything that some clever JS cant do, unless im mistaken. Addons dont really compromise security that much, unless theyre plugin-style addons.
Its a Beta. Its also much much much faster when its not crashing; Ive been on minefield for several months and its easily every bit as speedy as chrome dev.
Providing 2 UIs sounds like a worse option than either copying chrome or rolling their own; you really want them making firefox MORE complex?
This is what themes and addons are for.
Bring back the god damn status bar. Change for change's sake is never a good idea.
Multiple crashes a day, error reporting that seldom worked, and it turns out really slow which I realized when I switched to Chrome. I tried, I really really did, to stick with it. But when it took forever to restart and would just keep happening I finally gave Chrome a shot at the urging of a friend. I have something like 25 windows and 100+ tabs open in Chrome and not a single crash. It's been running well over a week now with no issues. My crash logs for FF showed daily crashes, sometimes hourly, and when I got the "there was a problem reporting..." message I just weeped. A new version? Good for you! However I'm currently pretty happy with my much faster browser and will stick with it until it gives me reason to change - like you did!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
If Chrome had as much customization as Firefox did, I'd switch to Chrome, but seriously, Chrome doesn't even have basic history controls that even IE does. I'd like to have a happy medium between searching your history when it comes up in the URL bar and having completely private, cookie-free browsing, and that is just the start of the lack of customization on Chrome. Really, my web browser is the most (manually) accessed program on my computer, I'd like to customize it to fit my own tastes.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I just want a browser that starts up when I ask it to.
I don't want to start up a browser only to see a popup box asking me to update my extensions. And only after installing them, to start up.
Of course, this has been a thing with Firefox for a while if I recall. I migrated to Chrome almost by accident. It was never a conscious decision, I just got tired of that.
I never understood why Firefox extensions can't update in a different and more invisible way. Either completely invisibly (as Chrome updates are), or completely manually.
Chrome at least shows a link's target url at the bottom of the screen when the mouse hovers over it, status bar or no.
And before anyone brings it up, yes I know the URL now appears in the address bar. It's not long enough.
This is exactly what Mozilla needs to lean to start doing. I don't even care if they bury those options in about:config but major changes to basic things like address bars, title bars, status bars, tabs, etc should all be 100% optional not need yet another add-on. I prefer using add-ons to extend the browser, not restore functionality. Far too many of the add-ons I have already installed were only added to bring back some feature that was taken out of the browser or changed.
, and disingenuous (nobody uses it!).
Oh, for Pete's sake - just yesterday my daughter (age 7) was wondering why pbskids.org was taking so long to come up, and I showed her how to read the status bar. So now she does and doesn't ask me that question anymore.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I hate that... I rely on the status bar all the time. I disable the javascript setting that lets sites change the status bar text, so I see only what I'm supposed to. (and I run my browser maximized)
In Firefox 4.x, when you hover over URLs it DOES show part of it up top, near the address bar but it's truncated. You can see the domain you are about to connect to, but often not much more than that. It's important to see the entire URL.
That's a show stopper for me. I also dislike the new user interface.
I'm currently using Minefield in my Windows 7 install, just because it's a convenient 64 bit Firefox binary that is able to update itself. (official rather than third party). I don't care as much, because Windows is just for games, and the only browsing I do is to download new video drivers and such, and check a few of my forums.
Also, I can excuse this right now because it's "beta" quality, but when I first start Minefield in Windows (for the first time in a session) there's a lengthy, hard disk gyrating delay before it opens. I don't know what the Hell it's doing, but after that it's fine (and quick enough at page rendering)
But when we get to the point where Firefox 3.x.x is no longer maintained, I'll be changing browsers in Linux, which is my work environment and the browser is a very important application.
I'm not sure what that is going to be, because I like Firefox (and like to do my own custom builds of it), hate Chrome, hate Konqueror and I have never been very fond of Opera (Though it's quite usable). Maybe Seamonkey, if they don't mess that up too.
I can't see Firefox 3.x going away any time soon though, so I'm probably OK for a while.
It still shows the url on hover, however now it does it in the address bar. Takes a bit of cramming to fit it up there though, so it isn't ideal.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root
Tabs on top are fun, but work better in chrome.
I tried the RC, and the tabs aren't truly on top. So, if the window is maximized, I can't just toss my mouse cursor to the top of the screen and have it sitting amongst all the tabs.
Instead, they put a little 'Firefox' dropdown at the top. The dropdown should be somewhere else-- the tabs need to be on top so they are a 'million pixels high'.
I am happy to see it finally having a release date, I like the beta and look forward to the final release.
I'm surprised is it still called Beta, i never have problems with firefox 4
It seams a lot faster also, although some old plugins didnt work (well i had to much of them anyway).
I like the new design and speed.
I wonder will it become possible to upgrade a portable FF 3 to 4 ?
What is it they say, "the grass is always greener..."?
The grass is always greener before seamonkeys and firefoxes eat it all.
Ummm... just uncheck the "update add-ons automatically" checkbox in Preferences (Advanced... Update). Then you can do your manual updates as you wish.
This one works too: Status-4-Evar. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/
The only reason I keep FF around is for the HTTP Live Headers extension. And for the reason you mentioned. At least I don't feel alone when saying that now.
Strange how so many comments here say the same thing:
* Where's the status bar?!
* Eh, I'm switching to Chrome
And yet Chrome also lacks a status bar!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I hope that FF4 developers have learned about the free() function.
Oops, thanks.
Apparently it's not the Firefox developers that are stupid, it's me. Should have occurred to me earlier!
If you want a stripped down/light-weight browser, FireFox out of the box is just fine. Just don't install any skins or extensions.
HTH!
The extensions I use in order of most-used to least-used:
AdBlock Plus (the auto-playing video ads finally prompted me to start using it - until then I was willing to put up with ads in exchange for "free" content)
Tab Mix Plus
Google Toolbar
QuickRestart (on Windows only, for dealing with firefox sucking 100% CPU when flash or other plugins go awry)
Web Developer
Firebug
Cooliris
QuickJava
None of it is anything I would consider bloat; I use all of those toolbars. If I couldn't use extensions (which some of you would call bloat) then I would probably use Chrome instead. Extensions make Firefox the most useful browser for my purposes.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Looks like Mozilla is continuing to dumb down its user interface. Is there a browser around that targets the geek market? One for those of us who want more information and more control?
I thought exactly the same. For me, FF3 was already a step backwards. For example, the Download window doesn't even show the URL of the download anymore. The "awesome bar" is awful. I don't know about you, but I have a ton of Bookmarks, and I bookmark sites that I want to read later, and not just sites that I happen to visit everyday. It's really annoying when all those bookmarks pop up every time I enter an URL (yeah I know you can turn this off, but it that has never really worked for me).
I haven't tried the FF4 beta yet, but from what I read here on /., it has to be awful. No status bar - WTF? No SSL info - WTF? Static window title - WTF? Sure some of it can be recovered by using addons. However, IMHO most of this should be core functionality - and using addons to provide this functionality is cumbersome and makes the browser unnecessary slow. Moreover, it's difficult to know which addons are trustworthy and which not (remember the NoScript case). Having to many addons is also a pain, because every addon has to make updates, and some even contain ads and/or open their website on every update (NoScript).
I really wish there was a good "expert" browser. Maybe it could even regularly copy some of the FF code (like GNU IceCat and Debians IceWeasel do), since many of the issues only affect the user interface.
Tabs on Top is optional. They have default settings depending on the host OS, but it can be enabled/disabled by clicking on the Firefox Button > Options > Tabs on Top.
Mozilla, like all market centric organisations, does not care about technical features, usefulness, usability or technical competence. Like all such companies, they care about only one thing--the latest fad. They will follow this fad, be it graphical, academic, ergonomic and they will follow it regardless of its effect, positive or negative, on their overall product.
Mostly, these fads are graphical: Moving menus and status bars, button redesign, interface overhaul, theme redesign and countless other features that are of use or interest only to the 0.1% of users who are even remotely interested in design or aesthetics. The rest of us simply have to put up with them, confusing and unhelpful as they are.
Often, the fad is ergonomic. The latest brain fart from an inexperienced school of 20-something UI "experts" simply _must_ be implemented, because it is the latest "best practice" or "modern interface". The MS Office Ribbon is the pinnacle of this kind of fad, and shows how destructive and unhelpful following it can be. No doubt the status bar offended the creed of the latest generation of UI prodigies and had to be done away with. The same with tabs on top. Most people are in reality confused, perturbed and frustrated by these kinds of unhelpful changes, but organisations implement them anyway. I suspect largely to keep their otherwise useless UI design teams in employment.
Sometimes, the fads are academic. The self signed cert debacle being the primary example. Users were deprived of convenient working encryption because encryption without authentication was declared worse than unencrypted connections by fiat. Some useless academic process had not been followed because of the myth in the middle.
Basically, the development of Firefox is not done with the interests of users in mind. It is done with the interests of experts too many opinions on how things should be done, and not enough willingness to compromise or listen to feedback. Mercifully however, we still have extensions, so the worst meddling can be successfully undone. Pity the users of Chrome then.
May the Maths Be with you!
That's a show stopper for me.
Same here for quite a while - fortunately Status-4-Evar plugin showed up to remedy that particular ill.
Tabs in the title bar was recently landed on the trunk. If it's not enabled for beta 9, it will be in beta 10.
Then why not implement these features as add-ons? That way users can uninstall them, do choose the custom install options and not install them at all. The awesomebar would have been better implemented as a core add-on as would have these fancy tab management ideas.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Yes, it's called SeaMonkey. However, it's slowly turning into the project of the SeaMonkey Council leader instead of the community's.
For the love of all that is holy... why are we no longer allowed to know what we are hovering and what we are loading?
What a lovely "addition" and quite "progressive"... i'm all for progress, but come on people....
--ToO
No. If FF4 as of beta 8 is any indication, they broke parts of it entirely. Bits of it are slicker, but it has mechanical issues and memory leaks.
Otherwise, it's not really that much different from a GUI standpoint. The guts are no doubt rearranged, but outside of a few code freaks not many people will really know.
Yep, that option was called 'Firefox' for a long time. The fact that its no longer 'Firefox' is what the complaint is.
Remember Firefox started life as the clean browser only component of the Seamonkey package.
Seamonkey went away, Firefox took its place and doesn't look like its too far away from being Seamonkey again, just waitting for Thunderbird to turn into a firefox plugin ... oh wait ... nevermind.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It would be nice to see it in the Mac App Store. The unified update system is quite relaxing, as opposed to dozens of random Sparkle & other custom update notifications.
I was forced to use 2.0 on certain machines until a few months ago, and frankly it can't handle the modern Internet.
Tell me this, what would you remove from FF3 that you consider to be bloated -- or did you just want to get a comment in early so you could be modded up?
I dare any of you who modded the parent Insightful to benchmark FF2 versus the current build of FF3.6 versus FF4 beta9 in startup speed, memory usage, page loading time and javascript. I'll let you in an a little secret: it's gotten progressively faster across the board over time.
They didn't release an RC and there have been several beta releases already. I don't see any real new information here. Announcing that there will be a release announcement sometime in the future seems like they are just trying to get publicity. Seriously, they didn't even commit to a release date. It makes me so annoyed, I don't even want to discuss it. Oh wait, ooops.
With all the talk about NoScript like functionality being in Chrome, when I reformated my system I decided to make the switch to Chrome. However after searching the internet for about an hour the best I came up with is either it doesn't actually work (still executes JavaScript just hides it) or is a cludge at best.
Been running FF4 ever since, it's fast and does everything i want. I guess I'll switch to Chrome when they give me a reason, being almost as good isn't a reason.
If someone can prove me wrong on the NoScript I'd be willing to give it a go again.
No. If FF4 as of beta 8 is any indication, they broke parts of it entirely. Bits of it are slicker, but it has mechanical issues and memory leaks.
Sir, what version of FF have you been using? As far as I know, it has ALWAYS had "mechanical issues and memory leaks", that's not a new feature in FF4.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I thought FF3 was a lot better in terms of ergonomics.
The status bar and toolbar-button screwups in FF4 are a step backwards.
And FF3 didn't ramp my memory usage up over 70%, ever. FF4 gets there after a couple of tabs are open, and grows.
I had the same problem. I use the 'Hide Caption Titlebar Plus' addon to ensure the tabs are flush with the top of the screen. I love the layout of Chrome but I don't like its Yeti-like footprint.
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
I kinda like Tab Candy. I use it at work to keep work related and other browsing activities cleanly seperated. What I don't like is the lack of statusbar: I have been looking in the statusbar to look where a link leads since the nineties and now they move it to the addressbar of all places. That addressbar is now a jumble of functions: showing the address, page load indicator, status area, etc. They even moved the reload button in there. It's a mess.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
FF4 gets there after a couple of tabs are open, and grows.
It's still "beta"...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's the one I'm using too. Though I also had to download a theme (Strata reloaded) that put a clear separator between the bottom of the page and the top of the "Add-on bar" (yuck) or else it looks like ass.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Not any more, from the sound of it.
The 4.0 release will get them mass-market answers on their choices to ignore complaints in the nominal beta intervals, making it the real beta.
4.1 will probably have those answers acted upon, or see market share shift as people decide that if FF is going to start acting crippled like IE does, it's time to experiment with Chrome or Opera or Safari.
FF4 beta still doesn't do 100% on the Acid3 test, btw. Chrome and Safari nail it.
You're not using "Noscript"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Before you continue with your "dumbing down" routine have some time to check the actual preview version.
You get the url of link on right side of the your top url bar. Which is actually neater once you get used to it.
Also now it tells you whenever it's connecting or downloading to/from the server on the actual tab so it's actually more informative.
That leaves status bar pretty much redundant.
Nope. Two of the extensions I listed allow me to disable javascript when I need it disabled.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
FF4 beta still doesn't do 100% on the Acid3 test, btw. Chrome and Safari nail it.
Nor it will, because Acid3 is an arbitrary goal, and the part that Firefox doesn't implement (SVG fonts) are largely irrelevant if you have WOFF support.
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A beta with memory leaks? oh, the horror! what shall we have next, missing features in alphas? nightly builds that don't compile? cats and dogs living together!?
God damn you, video game industry, your habit of naming playable demos "beta", and your players that carry such expectations to the rest of the software industry.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Actually, Firefox addons can use XPCOM components which can be used to access directly the filesystem, for example, and you can even create and include your components written in C or C++ which can basically do anything Firefox can.
And in FF4, you can even use JS C-types to call native C and C++ library functions from Javascript.
Dilbert RSS feed
Firefox + Vimperator is still my favorite, but uzbl is very much a geek browser.
Dilbert RSS feed
Yes you can see the link in the address bar, but only when working full screen on a 2500+ pixel one.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Perhaps you didn't notice all of the bloat that was added between the time the Firefox source code was:
int main(void) return 0;
and version 0.5.
I kinda like Tab Candy. I use it at work to keep work related and other browsing activities cleanly seperated. What I don't like is the lack of statusbar: I have been looking in the statusbar to look where a link leads since the nineties and now they move it to the addressbar of all places.
Well, the reason it's there does make logical sense: The current URL is there, and when you hover over a link, the next URL is shown after it. So you can see which URL is going to which.
But I am not sure it makes practical sense. It's a little confusing for me right now. I'm not sure whether I'll get used to it and love it (like the awesomebar), or whether it will just remain 'odd'. I'm giving it a chance though.
You get the url of link on right side of the your top url bar.
I'm already using the right side of my top URL bar. Why not leave the status bar where it is? It's not hurting anything. I have plenty of vertical resolution for it. What about my noscript icon, and the SSL icon?
If they really want to save some vertical space, they should get rid of the find bar. Bring back the find window from 2.x.
Also now it tells you whenever it's connecting or downloading to/from the server on the actual tab so it's actually more informative.
How do you fit an entire URL on the tab? My current tab has the following visible "Mozill...". That's barely enough characters to fit 'slashdot', let alone linux.slashdot.org
Besides, if it tells me what site it is connecting to on the tab itself, where am I supposed to read the page title?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
ABP and greasemonkey Better Privacy (kills LSOs) and Flashblock are nice too I used memoryfox (afom?) for a while but now it's offline now. I hadn't updated it for a while; heard it actually caused problems? But the older versions tended to keep mem usage Lazurus (recovers text forms) is nice (but latest update has caused a few fails on page loads; nothing terrible, I just stop the script).
I love my firefox, I really do. I've been using Firefox 4 Beta for the last 4 months or so! But frequently I look into my task manager and see Firefox consuming 700-1500MB of memory! It is okay on my computer with 8GB of ram, but still very unacceptable! When will Firefox become more memory efficient?
Student Research and Development
Job title bloat follows code bloat? Firefox has been too fat and lazy to compete with Opera or Chrome for quite a while now. Word up to senior managing executive directors of making coffee.
I don't want to start up a browser only to see a popup box asking me to update my extensions. And only after installing them, to start up.
You would prefer to start the browser, update the extensions, and then restart it?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
That's a show stopper for me.
Same here for quite a while - fortunately Status-4-Evar plugin showed up to remedy that particular ill.
Yeah what's the bet the motherfuckers start blocking extensions when people decide they are standard? Ever since they took away the option to revert from Awfulbar and it started requiring an extension, I don't trust them. They've gone off the rails!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'd argue that bookmarks are far more of a waste to have bolted on than Panorama. Once you use it, I don't see how you can go back to plain old tabs. Saying that's a bolted on waste is like five years ago, when everyone said tabs were a bolted on waste, because you could just open forty browser windows.
I might even say that Panorama is better than vertical nested tree bookmark tabs.
The lack of the Panorama (or even vertical nested tree tabs) is the primary reason I don't use Chrome.
An ideal solution would be that if they took a certain number of functions and made them something you could add/remove during or after installation. Not just "go to our repository and search out of thousands of extensions", but part of the actual installation that said "these are official components of the browser as we deliver it to you, but feel free to remove them right here and they will not be installed".
Anyway, I've been using FF4 for months on several platforms (*nix, OSX, Windows) and it has been pretty great. My only complaint would be that flash crashes about 80% of the time. Seriously, if you load up youtube, there's an 80% chance that it'll crash before you can play a video. There's a 100% chance that it'll crash if you do much to the playing interface (play, pause, play, forward, select another featured video, etc). And there's about an 80% chance that the GMAIL flash interface will do the same. Constantly see the "flash plugin has crashed on this page - please click here to reload the page".
I gave Chrome a chance, but the lack of decent tab handling sent me packing. I couldn't even find a decent solution among the available extensions (something like the Vertical Tree View extension on FF or even Panorama/Tab Candy). There are some solutions - they're just all kind of clumsy.
Honestly it doesn't have to be a perfect browser, as I'm getting ready to ditch Chrome just on the basis of poor image support and the fact that Firefox is FOSS, through-and-through. Scrolling in Firefox is also much nicer than in Chrome. It's all in the details, and since Firefox is nigh-endlessly customizable through extensions, most of those details can be taken care of. It's just a matter of how soon all those extensions get updated for Firefox 4, and how much drag they're going to put on the browser once everything is just the way you want it.
They want to phase out the status bar, and they figured not providing that functionality was for the best
Wow, that's simply awful. The status bar is there for a reason. Do they really want people following links with even less information than they have now? If my browser is stalling out trying to load a page, how will I know what domain to block?
Looks like Mozilla is continuing to dumb down its user interface. Is there a browser around that targets the geek market? One for those of us who want more information and more control?
More to the point, even if they think this is a good idea, how hard would it be to include an OPTION to turn it back on. Just like they could easily include an option to turn back on the old address bar.
Simplifying the interface for some users might be a good idea. But removing choices from power users is a terrible idea, and will drive people into the arms of Google/Opera.
It is ridiculous that to get decent functionality back one must install a series of add ons that do little more than restore features.
Read Pynchon.
...that the release version of Firefox 4 doesn't have the same shitty interface that the betas did. If it does, I'm going to stick with 3.6.
Hopefully they will come around on this. They are deprecating the value of SVG.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank you, I'm going to try that extension tonight when I boot to Windows for some death and destruction.
NoScript pretty much breaks the entire Internet and AdBlock Plus already blocks the ads, so I don't see why you need it.
click Firefox=>Options=>menu bar and you're back to the 3.6 interface (except for the status bar..)
A news story about an announcement that itself is an announcement basically announcing they will be announcing the release of FF4 in a month?
wow
, tell me about what you REALLY CAN NOTICE is DIFFERENT in the rendering between 1.5 and 3.x or hell, 4.0.
Apparently you dont realize that one of the biggest features of 3.6 was its massively improved JS rendering? Or that 4.0s big name features include such things as separated processes for plugins (easier to manage bloat and memory usage, plus stability), massively imroved javascript, hardware accelerated page rendering, hardware accelerated videos, HTML5 (for a speedier multimedia experience), and a handful of other performance optimizations?
Listen, Ive been using firefox since the .9 days, and I live on the bleeding edge. Firefox has progressively gotten faster, and a lot of that "bloat" (fixing the retarded options menu of yore; adding a "new tab" button; improving the download manager; a plugins manager) were all blamed for bloat at one time or another, but they filled roles that were done quite a lot by extensions, with the result that the "complete package" (browser + addons) was a slow, buggy mess.
Firefox 3.0 I can MAYBE accept that you feel it was slower than 2.x, but 2.0 was generally better and smoother than 1.5, which was better than 1.0, etc. 3.6 is NOTICABLY faster (go to chrome experiments on 1.5, see how it croaks) than all of its predecessors, and 4.0 blows them all out of the water.
Anyone who remarks on "can you notice a difference between 1.5 and 4.0" -- no less, on a site as heavy in JS as slashdot-- really doesnt have a clue.
i thought 3 turned out to be much faster and better than 2. its a matter of opinion.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
if you move to chrome, you won't even have the OPTION to have tree-style tabs. i don't think chrome allows extensions to alter the chrome (unintended pun).
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
You've obviously never tried it. It shows the link you're hovering on in the URL bar now. As for blocking a slow domain, I don't think the average user is going to care about that. Install adblock and 90% of the laggy ad sites go away.
And as for targeting the geek market, I'm pretty sure the thousands of addons let you customize Firefox into your perfect idea of what a browser should be.
I have been using The beta since it started and I was wondering where the status bar went. it's only two weeks ago that I noticed the url in the address bar.
Mozilla, like all market centric organisations, does not care about technical features, usefulness, usability or technical competence. Like all such companies, they care about only one thing--the latest fad. They will follow this fad, be it graphical, academic, ergonomic and they will follow it regardless of its effect, positive or negative, on their overall product.
I'm a Firefox dev, and I have no idea how you came to this opinion of Mozilla's development practices.
:)
Anyhow, all of our development is in the open - you can look at weekly meeting notes on our wiki, read debate on our mailing lists, details of decision making on IRC and bugzilla. So you can see exactly how we make the decisions that we make. I honestly don't see how you can read all that stuff, and say that we are 'market centric'.
You can argue with particular decisions that are made - often after a lot of debate (again, see our mailing lists and bugs). No body is perfect. I personally don't agree with all of them. But to say they are made due to 'following fads' - that's pretty funny
Cripes... I now have to retract some of what I said.
First of all, the status bar 4ever extension works acceptably as a status bar.
It seems, with the update I got last night (I presume it was the Minefield update... I also got Windows updates last night as well, some of which were "recommended" reliability/compatibility updates), Minefield no longer does that delay with hard disk dance when first starting it up. I rebooted Windows 7 three times to test that and it wasn't just a fluke.
I pretty much have most of the yuck factor sorted as best as I can now too (Things like showing the menu bar and tabs underneath address bar I had already done, but I solved my last niggle... I realized I could move the home button, which was way over to the far side of my wide screen display. Duh!)
I might start to experiment with Firefox 4.x in Linux now.
I just hope that status bar extension isn't going to be too fragile against new firefox 4 versions when the time comes. I've tended to shun extensions in the past, because of the pile of feces people go through at upgrade time.
My GOD yes. Still use Chrome but come on, if it's something we want as a feature, just bloody add it!
http://www.gibby.net.au
At least it started to compile, though.
Every end has half a stick.
It shows around 80 characters of the URL here, and includes both the beginning (before the first /) and the end (.html), ellipting the middle. I don't necessarily like that when compared to the greater width that was available in the status bar, but it's still not entirely useless.
I tried beta 8 earlier this week, as I noticed Firefox 3.6.whatever was getting awfully slow at loading /.. It crashed the VirtualBox VM in which it was running.
I'm using Chrome right now; /. works OK, but the Flash plugin tends to crash. Fortunately, YouTube can be set to offer up HTML 5 video (but it won't use HTML 5 for embedded video; you have to let Flash load up, then click through to get HTML 5 video in a new tab).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Firefox started as a lightweight browser because Seamonkey was bloated. The addons system was designed so that new functionality could be added. They then added new functionality to the base system, instead of using on-by-default addons. The system should have been kept as minimal as possible, and just shipped with a bunch of default addons.
Not a sentence!
Well by your logic then running as root isn't "punching a hole in your security" and therefor FUD because you aren't doing anything dangerous, you just aren't being as careful as you could be. NOW do you see the problem in your logic? And one shouldn't complain about being pissy when one whips out their Johnson. Your first post claimed FUD without anything to back it up whereas I provided links backing up my position..
Either running with high permissions is GOOD or it is BAD there is NO in between with these concepts. Considering what Vista and more importantly 7 use is a UAC administered "hybrid user" which has some of the powers of Admin and some of a regular user combined this is why low rights mode exists in the first place. This is especially true of Windows 7 because of the irritation caused by legacy apps and UAC on Vista which caused many to just kill it.
And can we both agree the browser is the closest one gets to the bare Internetbarring running your own email server? Because after all ALL drive by malware, JavaScript hijacks, malicious downloads, they ALL start in the same place...in the browser.
So your entire argument boils down to having the most risky piece of software on your system running in a hybrid admin mode is good because...why? You were quick to yell FUD yet I see now real explanation about why running in a higher mode is better for the system just that you don't see a harm in it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.