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Firefox 4, A Huge Pile of Bugs
surveyork writes "Firefox 4.0 beta 9 (AKA 'a huge pile of awesome') was released on January 14, 2011. Firefox 4's release schedule includes a beta 10 and a release candidate before the final launch in late February. However, one wonders if this schedule won't slip again, since there are still more than 100 'hardblocker' bugs, more than 60 bugs affecting Panorama alone and 10 bugs affecting the just-introduced Tabs-on-Titlebar. Some long-standing bugs won't be fixed in time for Firefox 4 final either (example, example). Many startup bugs are currently pending, although Firefox 4 starts much faster than Firefox 3.6. As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst Firefox enthusiasts. Perhaps we'll have to wait until Firefox 4.1 to have this 'huge pile of bugs' (mostly) fixed."
I'd rather them wait to make 4.0 stable than release crap and hope to have it done by 4.1. I mean, c'mon, who do they think they are? KDE? But seriously, I was using the FF4 beta for a while and it was pretty slick, and faster than the last stable release. However, it had lots of issues, such as the flash plugin container freezing or crashing constantly. The new features in FF4 did warm me up to trying Chrome though, and I may have become converted despite being late to the party on that one.
I'm using the Second Beta release, and I've not noticed any problems with the browser, or email, or newsgroups, or composer. Opera 11 is also stable. May be time for a switch? (Just a thought.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What's important to browser developers is getting the upper hand in their constant pissing contest over Javascript execution speed. Nothing else matters. NOTHING.
...they took away even the *option* to have the status bar.
I guess in the true OSS way I'll have to fork the project and add my own. ;)
(yes yes, sarcasm. probably best to spell it out ahead of time, because what slashdot post isn't complete these days without a plethora of disclaimers and qualifiers)
The necessary qualifier to ensure my criticism of open source software doesn't earn me a minus 1: I like open source.
The necessary disclaimer that forking FF is silly: I am well aware that third party extensions for FF4 exist that add status bar function.
I love open source and firefox, I feel sad when I hear there are problems, but writing tight code is indeed challenging for anyone. The plugin compatibility in particular seem to present a challenge. Still using it and recommending it though. Chrome may be open source too, but big-corporation-sponsored open source frequently becomes something else later on in life. I think open source needs to start pushing a pledges model of funding, the totally-free or ad-sponsored models don't fit for all cases.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
When these values are sufficiently close, it's time to recognize that something is very deeply wrong with your code base. Or your programmers are monkeys, but the former case is most likely. Start over.
I've been running FireFox 4 Beta for some time, however sadly it updated itself to the latest version yesterday and since then it's been virtually unusable.
Anything running Javascript or Flash produce either blank screens (sometimes just by scrolling the page) or even the window title bar flashes (which it is as I type this).
4.0b9 is definitely a regression - I want 4.0b8 back...
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
The way Firefox is going, they might as well just ship wget with addon functionality and tell everyone to write their own extensions if they want "extra" features like a GUI or mouse support.
So, a beta version of a major new release has a lot of bugs? You don't say.
sic transit gloria mundi
Chrome is better in just about every way with the exception of extensions. There are basically two killer features that work better under Firefox than Chrome: script blocking (NoScript) and ad blocking (AdBlock Plus). There are ad blocking extensions for Chrome, but they don't work quite as well as AdBlock Plus does.
There is no real equivalent to NoScript for Chrome. There are a bunch of things that kinda provide script blocking functionality, but nothing that's anywhere near as good as NoScript.
Beyond that it's much faster and more memory efficient. It doesn't like being left open long periods of time, though. I can get away with leaving Firefox open for like a week or so, Chrome pretty much demands that you kill it and restart it every day. Not really a huge deal.
The only thing I really miss in Chrome is NoScript. The ad blocking is mostly good enough.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Firefox is slower (in my case it currently hangs for roughly a minute on start-up. Keep those windows open), has better extensions and the best memory management I've ever seen in a browser (used to be a pet peeve of mine, when they still sold memory leaks as features). Chrome has some great features if you connect to the cloud to socialize your AJAX relationships or something (e.g. you can treat browser pages like apps with start menu entries and stuff - although I always have to reload many manually after launch for it to work properly). It's fast and it will always be up-to-date. That's because Google puts its update service (pray to god that that's all it does) everywhere you can fit that stuff on Windows. There's the Autostart entry, the delayed start, the service, the IE plugin, the Firefox plugin, the Opera plugin and probably a few I missed. But don't be afraid that it's gonna spy on you. Many of the bleeding edge features (Google's new app-store) only work if you log-in with your Google account so they're gonna know every thing about you anyway.
That's what I mean with slightly creepy. Your neighbor might have never given you any reason to question his integrity but if he insists on going through your trash and wants to install a camera in your bathroom you're probably gonna be suspicious.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The nice thing about Firefox is the ability to whitelist cookies and then have it clear anything not whitelisted on browser close. Chrome's cookie controls are still not even close to that and it's the one feature that keeps me off Chrome.
I find that to be disappointing and unexpected. Keep in mind that I do not know what it takes to create a browser or what is involved in passing the Acid3 test. I just know that Firefox has a strong and loyal user base who are not interested in using another browser. I am one of them.
Is SVG fonts the only thing that keeps FF4 at less-than 100%? If so, I am less concerned -- SVG fonts is a good idea, but I would be more interested in other things as I have not seen SVG fonts in use anywhere. (I know, it's a chicken or egg thing.) That said, I love SVG. It's an awesome technology. Not long ago, I was planning a project that will enable me to generate SVG output based on the contents of a database... in this case, a floor layout for my office and the location of all resources and people where output can be filtered or limited based on report criteria. (The project is on the back burner for now, but the fact that SVG is an XML document format makes generating this sort of output amazingly possible.)
And yet if were the IE team to say the same thing Microsoft would be being constantly trashed claiming that they're ignoring standards. Oh how double standards are fun.
The problem is bugzilla is written in Perl as a CGI, it's horribly inefficient. Just the 5 second availability check from my F5 cluster had a single core VM running on an x5670 Xeon pegged at ~80% CPU usage. We had to change the check to pulling one of the static help files in order to quiet down the obscene CPU usage which means we are only checking the Apache module not the entire stack.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You would, too, if you had "more bugs than a bait shop".
Sorry, I've been rewatching the original Tron. I couldn't help it.
This very one is 12 years old (yes, you read right), it's huting HTML4 compliance (HTML5 is not a standard yet) and is also affecting all known opensource browsers.
Eyecandies first, stuff that matters maybe.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Except SVG Fonts are going to be an optional part of the SVG standard, because the standards committee recognizes they are unimportant. This is because superior alternatives exist (WOFF). This is why Mozilla chose not to implement SVG Fonts. Despite all the FUD in the summary (what is with the anti-Firefox FUD in stories lately, anyway?), the vast majority of Firefox users are not crying out for Firefox to pass a meaningless, arbitrary, and outdated acid test. SVG Fonts are what keeps Firefox from passing the test. There is no benefit to adding that feature except to pass the Acid3 test.
That's the thing about standards, you're not supposed to skip bits of them just because you don't think they're important.
No, torn between the people that demand that all Firefox features be reduced to addons and the people who want everything in their browser, they gave in to the addon people and made it an addon if you need the old status bar back.
At this point, Mozilla can't win no matter what they do. If they take features away and put them in addons, the people who want everything (like me :) ) complain. If they add features in, the people who want all the features they in particular don't need to be addons complain. They're in a no-win situation. They put an incredible focus on performance, and people ignore it. Firefox 4 doesn't just have a new, much faster Javascript engine - there's DOM performance improvements, the startup improvements mentioned in the summary, and the UI in general is much smoother and quicker. But it doesn't matter, because my $PET_PROBLEM_X exists. I don't understand why other browsers aren't held to the same standard. Chrome, for me, is missing tons of features and crashes all the time. It's still a decent browser, and I don't spend all day on Slashdot railing against it.
That said, there is a really annoying bug in Beta 9 - some of my tabs, after I close them, still exist in the ether somewhere and the Awesomebar wants to "switch to tab" when I go to that URL, and there's no tab to switch to, making me press alt+enter to open a new tab.
But I'm pretty confident that and the other major blockers will be fixed by the final release, whenever it comes out. Firefox 4 is still a major improvement over 3.6 even with those bugs, and despite my personal pet peeves like tabs-in-titlebar.
You clearly have never worked on a large software product.
During development of a product, you will see new bug rates go much higher than fixed bug rates. This imbalance will continue until you stop adding new features and focus purely on stabilization and product delivery. Firefox 4.0 beta 9 is still landing features (some of which have been baking for a long time in separate branches) so their bug rates look pretty sane to me. All products ship with known bugs - you just try to trim the list down to things that users are highly unlikely to see.
For web browsers, crash bugs are the most dangerous. They may represent routes through the code where bad pointers are being consumed and these can potentially lead to remote exploits. All reproducible crash bugs should be fixed as soon as possible.
Having browsed through the outstanding bug list for Firefox 4.0 and looked at the planned schedule (late February release), it looks reasonable. If some of the new features lead to a burst of new defects, I suspect that date will move out or features will get blacklists (like the WebGL/ Hardware acceleration blacklists for Linux)
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
In the mean time, use Chrome...
This part of the standard is being errataed to be optional.
And yes, people skip parts of standards all the time if they don't think they're important, especially when the standard was created for a totally different use case (in particular, SVG as originally written was basically created to not be used with HTML and not be used on the web; there were nods to both but they were not the primary use case). How many zip decompressors actually allow multiple copies of the same file to be present in the archive and look at the index to see which one to extract? How many just grab whatever they find?
You may also want to read http://dbaron.org/log/2004-06#e20040609a and http://dbaron.org/log/2006-08#e20060818a for some of the history here...
In my experience then, the performance enhancements just aren't being felt. In real world use, I can't say that Firefox or Safari is "faster" - they both perform adequately in terms of speed.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!" at this stage of the game - all the browsers I have tried have been pretty good in recent years. What does affect me are large swings in usability that make a browser annoying to use - like the removal of the status bar, or whatever bug has been added to Webkit that causes the hyper annoying "no paste" in some slashdot comment boxes on Safari.
Performance matters to an extent, but I think it's been turned into a "my browser is 30 ms faster!" pissing contest now that the "my browser scores higher on Acid!" stuff has died down a little.
I agree that they're (FF devs) stuck between the proverbial Dwane Johnson and a hard place; a big complaint was feature bloat, so they stripped features, but that argument falls down a little when something like Pandora is rolled in as a primary feature and something as simple and useful as the status bar is taken out. Not all people like Pandora, so they can disable it. Not all people *don't* like a status bar... but you have to go third party extension to get it back.
I wonder if the ultimate goal of the FF project should be a "roll your own" - a core, barebones browser that has a whole list of features available, and you just checkbox the ones you want at download (or install) time, or go for a few pre-defined profiles.
As you may notice, from your own link, you need a third party extension to bring the status bar back, as I mentioned in my post originally; necessary because YES they did take away the option to have the status bar.
Using third party extensions to put back functionality that you removed is the very definition of "took away the option". If the option still existed, as it does in FF 3.6, then this third party extension would not be necessary.
You can try and justify the decision with a handwavy "oh, you can get a plugin" but that really isn't the point.
You clearly have never worked on a large software product. [...] Firefox 4.0 beta 9 is still landing features [...] the planned schedule (late February release) [...] looks reasonable
Apologies for the selective quoting. But it seems that the Mozilla team has never worked on a large software product either.
Landing features in Beta 9? Planning a release less than two months after feature freeze (assuming there is one)? Has Mozilla taken over the Google definition of beta? Should we wait for SP1 before upgrading to the new version?
In the mean time, use IE9
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But, you know, P2P is evil pirate/terrorist/pedophile thing and it can't solve traffic issues because it clobbers the tubes internet is made of...
Or, without the irony : I wholeheartedly agree.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Ok, so in the spirit of "removing bloat" Pandora is now a feature, but to balance it out, the status bar has to go!
There are some UI elements that genuinely work and are useful without being bloated or ineffective - the status bar was (is) one of them; somewhere to display the entire URL when you hover on a link and any other "status" items the browser shows you.
Your argument that the entire point is that it has extensions to get it the way you want would work if the thing was totally barebones and you had to add in everything you wanted - like Pandora, ad blocking, flash plugin etc, but that's just not the case. What you have now is a browser that has some default features that are more suited to plugins, and some plugins that really should be built in.
There's your problem. No new features should be introduced this close to release. Traditionally, no new feature should be added to a beta, period! They're asking for it.
So, if I shouldn't have to download extensions, how do I turn on the status bar?
Assuming, that by your own admission, it "should have enough features that most users shouldn't need to". I am *far* from the only person who has expressed dismay at the removal of such a core function, so if the people who are ambivalent about the bar (ie, can just disable if if they don't want it if it was included) is more than 50% of the total users, compared to the ones that want it to stay then it's ok because "most" don't care for it (and can easily disable it).
As it is, they took out one of the most useful ways to check URLs at a glance, and instead added a big feature that has introduced a load of showstopper bugs for their release candidate. How strange. Looking at the FF4 beta made me trade it out for Chrome as my secondary browser to see how that goes for a while.
Perhaps this is why Chrome has gained so much marketshare over its relatively short life (obviously in small part due to being promoted by Google on the main page on on youtube) - FF is doing strange things like taking out highly useful core function that *a lot* of people requested be put back (but have been told "no, go away") and instead have tried to put in flashy stuff like Pandora that's buggy as hell, adds to the bloat and is now included whether you want it or not - seemingly the ideal thing that should be an addon.
I'm sure the code for the status bar is practically behemoth in comparison! An unwieldy monster that was dragging FF performance to its knees!
The way people bitch about "bloat," that'd probably a smart thing to do.
I've reported dozens of Firefox bugs over the years. Although I'm primarily a chip designer, I have studied usability (HCI, etc.), and I have a background in testing as well. I know about making intuitive systems, and I've been trained to be more objective about it, rather than just complaining about what I don't like. When I report Firefox bugs, they may get ignored because they're understaffed, but I've never had one tell me flat out that I was wrong. I HAVE had Chrome devs just tell me I'm wrong. Does working for Google automatically make you arrogant?
The development notes say they are trying hard to crank down the bugs.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-01-18
we have fixed 90 hard blockers since the last code freeze
beta10 proposal: code freeze this Friday to get coverage on 90+ hard blockers fixed since b9
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's been a while, but I seem to recall you can run Bugzilla under ModPerl, which keeps the compiled versions in memory and simply re-executes them - yes, kinda like it should be - and thus gives you rather impressive speedups.
ModPerl has some gotchas re. variable scope and cleanup, though, so I may be wrong about it Just Working.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I think the issue in this case is that some of the standards involved have bits that are actively harmful to the web, from the point of view of some of the implementors involved. so it's not that they're useless; useless parts of a standard can be implemented. It's that they actively do damage...
Can anyone give a quick explanation of the relative pros/cons of Firefox4 vs. Chrome?
Although I find Chrome's interface a little uncomfortable (as a long-time Firefox user), I don't really know if there's a big reason to prefer one over the other. So a big delay of FF4 seems kind of irrelevant to me: I'd just use FF3 or Chrome.
Let's have a real one:
Chrome uses one process per tab - it uses a lot of memory
Firefox uses one process per plug, the rest is threaded - it uses way less memory (by a large difference if you start opening tabs)
Chrome starts very quickly
Firefox starts slower
Chrome updates silently in the background, its rather bad if you like to be in control of your PC (if Google decides evil or someone hack their update service, you get your trojan served silently)
Firefox downloads in the background but prompt for update - it's less convenient
Firefox allows you to store all your settings (bookmarks, history, tabs open, passwords, etc) strongly encrypted on mozilla's servers, or on your own personal server. You can even retrieve them from Firefox for Android and other platforms
Chrome, not
Chrome extensions do not require a browser restart and are instantly useable
Firefox extensions require restart
Chrome calls home in various ways, sending statistics to Google
Firefox does not
Firefox & Chrome rendering speed including javascript are feeling equivalent
Chrome is updated far more often, with small updates
Firefox has large updates, but more rarely
I don't really think the rest matters. I use Firefox because they stick to their ideals, it's fast enough and it's promising. I don't care about having "the newest thing around" (which is the only real reason people use Chrome and despise Firefox. It always happen that way)
Fact is, both are good browsers. Even IE9 and Opera are. And that's all thanks to Mozilla for pushing for standards and sticking to ideals.
Having about 30 Google or ex-Google employees in my friends or friends of friends circle and having talked with probably 40 or more at various parties and other events over the years I can say that it's about a 75-85% arrogance rate. Some worse than others. I believe the culture helps promote it. Generally the ones who aren't raging assholes are the ones who arrived there after spending some time in other parts of the industry or advanced academia (PhD work or professorial). The kids who went there right out of undergrad are the worst since Google does a great job of sheltering them from the real world. At this point if I meet anyone who's under 27 or so and has worked at Google for a while I assume any conversation will be unproductive unless I agree 100% with what they're saying. I'll be pleasantly surprised if this isn't the case.
On the plus side, the people I know who've escaped the clutches of Google often display a very serious drop in arrogance levels within a year or so.