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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.
What's important to browser developers is getting the upper hand in their constant pissing contest over Javascript execution speed. Nothing else matters. NOTHING.
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
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]
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.
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.
In the mean time, use IE9
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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?
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.