Firefox 4 Beta 12 Released; Fixes Over 650 Bugs

darthcamaro writes "At last! Firefox 4 Beta 12 is now available. There are over 650 bug fixes in this massive update including a fix for a memory leak that kept Firefox consuming RAM even without opening new tabs. The other big thing that many users have asked for is that FINALLY, when you hover over a link, the URL is displayed in the status bar, instead of the location bar."

Comments

Congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations to the development team of the most widespread Open Source project out there. Some of the bugs fixed were frustrating to say the least and it's nice to see some forward momentum. Regardless of the plan for the Firefox release schedule this year, we're all better served by release early, release often like this.

memory leak

[Anonymous Coward]

They finally fixed that memory leak! I was consistently using over 2gb ram by the time I got around to closing my FF windows.

Re:memory leak

[thsths]

They fixed one memory leak. I wouldn't be so sure it is the only one, and certainly not the last one. But it is a step in the right direction.

Re:memory leak

[Anonymous Coward]

That's your imagination. There was NEVER a memory leak in Firefox. It's caching. It's a feature. You are wrong. Firefox is perfect!

Wait, they fixed it? Great! Thank the FSM our browsers will no longer thrash out to swap after a few hours of usage!!

Re:memory leak

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Let's see what all of the ignorant Firefox goons have to say about this one.

If Mozilla had fixed the memory leak back when I still used and gave a shit about Firefox, I might still be using it today. Too bad for them that the world has already passed them by.

Re:memory leak

[Phoghat]

a fix for a memory leak that kept Firefox consuming RAM even without opening new tabs.

Which is why I switched to Chrome browser (which I haven't been all that satisfied with either because of slow rendering on pages with heavy Java usage)

So I'll download and try the beta and try Firefox again which had been my fave for more years than I care to count.

Status bar?

[93 Escort Wagon]

How can URLs be displayed in a non-existent status bar? Did they resurrect it? I didn't see anything about a "status bar" in the release notes...

Right now I'm using the "Status-4-evah" add-on to get the status bar back - and that plugin already takes care of displaying the URL in the "status bar".

Re:Status bar?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Replying to myself, since I just installed the update...

Basically as of Beta 12 they're imitating Chrome. If you hover over a link, a little pop-up displaying the link's URL appears at the bottom of the window.

Re:Status bar?

[Shikaku]

Like Chrome does. It just puts a little textbox showing the URL in the bottom.

Re:Status bar?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Like Chrome does. It just puts a little textbox showing the URL in the bottom.

It's a much better solution than what they were doing - I'm glad they changed it.

Re:Status bar?

[Eros]

How can URLs be displayed in a non-existent status bar? Did they resurrect it? I didn't see anything about a "status bar" in the release notes...

Right now I'm using the "Status-4-evah" add-on to get the status bar back - and that plugin already takes care of displaying the URL in the "status bar".

No, the status bar is still gone. Now it is like Chrome and IE9. You hover over the link and the URL is appears in the bottom left of the window.

Re:Status bar?

[The MAZZTer]

If you've seen how Chrome does it, Firefox does it the same way now.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

It took me a while to adapt to status bar at top, and now they have changed it back to bottom. Will these guys ever learn not to fuck with the UI.

Re:Status bar?

[Again]

It took me a while to adapt to status bar at top, and now they have changed it back to bottom. Will these guys ever learn not to fuck with the UI.

Dude, you're using a beta product. This is where the developers test various UI changes. If you don't like this then maybe you shouldn't be running the beta edition.

Re:Status bar?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

It's beta, not a final release version.

Re:Status bar?

[muindaur]

At least IE 9 still has the status bar. You have to enable it(hold alt menu), but it's still there.

Re:Status bar?

[stms]

You can sort of enable if you right click the at the top and check add-on bar though the url doesn't show up on it it still shows up in the chromey way they'll probably fix that before the release candidate.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a beta, retard. It's meant to test things like this.

Re:Status bar?

[yuna49]

Enabling the "Add-On Bar" in the View > Toolbars menu restores the traditional status bar it appears. At least I now have the icons for ForecastFox and NoScript at the bottom of the browser window again.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're imitating Firefox too. I'm using Firefox 3.6, and when I hover over a link it displays the URL at the bottom of the window. Maybe it's not imitating Chrome after all; sometimes a bug is just a bug.

Re:Status bar?

[pasamio]

They readded the status bar as the "add-on bar" in b11 or b10.

Re:Status bar?

[daviee]

It was horrible at the top. The space used in the URL box for that was way too short for screening the link before clicking on it...

Re:Status bar?

[nmb3000]

Basically as of Beta 12 they're imitating Chrome.

What else is new? "Imitate Chrome" has been the mantra for the entire Firefox 4 project. Everything about it reeks of "we can't think of anything original, so let's just copy Chrome". Violating the non-client area by putting tabs and buttons in the title bar (much more likely to break in future versions of $OS), removing important UI elements (decreasing usability), increasing the release schedule to artificially balloon version numbers, etc.

The best part is that everything I hate about Chrome, and all the reasons I don't use it, will now be translated over to Firefox 4. I can only hope that IE9 doesn't fail quite as hard as the other two, otherwise I guess I'll be sticking with Firefox 3 for the foreseeable future.

Re:Status bar?

[elashish14]

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy. Still, it's nice having status icons for NoScript and ABP in the right-hand side of the status bar. Any word on what happens to those? It far less of a waste of space than it would be to put them near top of the window.

And I also like having the search box on the same line as the menu so it stretches across the whole window. That way you can read the full suggestions, whereas the suggestions get cutoff if they're on the same line as the address bar.

This new release is gonna take a lot of getting used to.

Re:Status bar?

[Kernel Krumpit]

my (latest) ie9 has status bar w/out holding alt hold-down...

Re:Status bar?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Still, it's nice having status icons for NoScript and ABP in the right-hand side of the status bar. Any word on what happens to those? It far less of a waste of space than it would be to put them near top of the window.

You can keep the Add-ons Bar down at the bottom, and put them there (that's the toolbar that "Status-4-Evah" used as a faux Status Bar.

What I've done for the moment with those sorts of buttons (ABP and Tor in my case) is move them up to the right end of the tabs bar.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, it chopped off the URL at about half the window's width. And unlike Chrome, it does not expand the URL when the cursor stays at the link.

Re:Status bar?

[Obyron]

Artificially inflate version number? What the heck does that even mean? It's still going to be "Firefox 4" when it hits release. No one stupid enough to care about "it's version 12!" is smart enough to be downloading a beta. It's not like they're pulling a Slackware or something and going with Firefox 7, or worse, Firefox XP, or Firefox 2011.

Re:Status bar?

[hkmwbz]

I thought experiments were carried out during the alpha phase, and the beta phase was only supposed to be used to fix bugs...

Re:Status bar?

[BitZtream]

While the version number IS a stupid thing to worry about in and of itself, what they are doing with it on the other hand is an indication of what the leadership of Mozilla is thinking.

The general thought (at least my general thought) is that their playing a marketing game to win users by bumping version numbers rather than actually providing features. There are two reasons to do this. The first is, its an easy thing to do to get marketing attention. Fair enough. The second, and more worrisome is that they are doing the version number bump because its an easy thing to do AND since they aren't CAPABLE of providing new features in a timely manner and stable, they'll just do it and hang on while hoping something changes.

Typically, when you see software do this, you know the ship is on its way to the bottom if not already half way there. Googles version changes are just them making some silly statement about version numbers by basically making them meaningless, which while they currently aren't 'well defined' in general you know that a 1.0 to 2.0 bump is a much bigger, more likely to be incompatible change than a 1.1 to 1.2 bump. This indicates they are intentionally trying to be confusing. Thats bad in and of itself, whats worse is why are they are doing it? They don't appear to need to play any tricks, Chrome is standing on its own just fine.

So the number itself doesn't matter, but how its treated does.

Re:Status bar?

[Dayofswords]

Alpha, beta, whatever. they are just fancy labels, they have no set meaning.

Re:Status bar?

[Again]

I thought experiments were carried out during the alpha phase, and the beta phase was only supposed to be used to fix bugs...

You're probably right.

Whatever the case, I'm loving the status bar that is not a status bar being moved back to the bottom. I had a very hard time getting used to it on top.

Re:Status bar?

[BitZtream]

I thought experiments were carried out during the alpha phase, and the beta phase was only supposed to be used to fix bugs...

No, experiments are carried out during the prototype stage, defining any changes to your intended feature set before you start focus on the main development work.

The development stage you are organizing everything, getting some sort of sanity to all the random ideas ironing out issues left over from the prototype stage. Here you deal with any major issues and resolve things that will result in massive change that you missed in prototyping. You already screwed up if you're making a massive UNPLANNED overhaul of something in this stage. If you planned to rewrite a subsystem or part for some reason during prototyping or preproduction planning then its acceptable to do so.

The alpha stage is where you are pretty much in a feature freeze, with the exception that you're giving this to a wider range of early adoptors to ensure you haven't screwed up something that your limited internal groups didn't notice. You should be trying not to make changes to features that are more than bug fixes here.

The beta stage is a feature frozen, fix bugs only, no other changes till a release is cut.

Release Canidates are the last bits where almost nothing at all changes and no one but a very limited selection of people will ever notice any sort of difference.

Unfortunately, Mozilla takes its cue from Microsoft and calls things in the prototype and early development stages 'beta'. This shows in the finished product.

This might look like a long process that would take too much time in todays instant gratification world, but its not, you simply don't plan as many features between releases. You may not have 20 new features in your release notes, but having 3 releases with 5 features each, for 15 new features that WORK RIGHT and an application that is coherent will result in far more user satisfaction. You can jump on the race for having the highest version number if you want, but you don't change the process in order to do so. You'll cut off your nose to spite your face, and again, it shows in the product.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not make a better retard, the ones I see are bad enough.

*ducks

Re:Status bar?

[shadowthunder]

I'd wager you just weren't used to it being up there yet. I found it made hella more sense to be next to the current URL. In my short time with Betas 10 and 11, I grew accustomed to looked up there for the link and right-clicking to see the status of NoScript and AdBlock.

Re:Status bar?

[Skuto]

What else is new? "Imitate Chrome" has been the mantra for the entire Firefox 4 project. Everything about it reeks of "we can't think of anything original, so let's just copy Chrome".

Chrome has a pretty nice UI, so that ain't that bad. While I agree the "new" design can be more fragile, it maximizes the screen estate for reading, which matters. I'm happy with a Chrome-like browser that doesn't send everything I do off to Google, anyway.

Re:Status bar?

[Knuckles]

While the sibling comment is correct that there are no set meanings, it's most common (compare Wikipedia) to define beta as the phase when the software is for the first time given to end users for testing. This of course requires UI changes based on their feedback.

Re:Status bar?

[eexaa]

I wonder why there's FINALLY in caps. I actually liked the feature, and after getting used to it I'd probably say it just seems more reasonable. (addresses just belong to the address bar right?).

Hope they will have a switch to bring back the old behavior.

Re:Status bar?

[Seumas]

Yeah, like that whole Panorama awesomeness they stole from Chrome. Oh, wait.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you haven't seen how Chrome does it, Firefox still does it the same way.

Re:Status bar?

[moonbender]

I quickly adjusted to it being up there, but it did always have the problem of obscuring the current url as well as shortening the link url. The reduced contrast also makes it harder to read.

Re:Status bar?

[MrHanky]

That's an incredibly long comment for saying something which just isn't true. In the real world, alpha and beta are defined more pragmatically. They're only labels for various stages of "not done yet"; some projects may adhere to your long-winded definitions, most others don't.

Re:Status bar?

[tuppe666]

I think your a little confused about the version numbers, although if it does help with marketing their product I am all for it, although you point to the opposite(its confusing). The version numbering is about feature delivery. Getting good features out to users sooner rather than later, 2 years is simply too long a time between releases...and as we have seen its been difficult to coordinate this many major changes in one release, Releasing often simply has many advantages.

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've seen how Chrome does it, Firefox does it the same way now.

I have a feeling this is going to be one of the most used phrases of the year

Re:Status bar?

[drinkypoo]

Release Candidate is where you're only fixing bugs, no feature requests. Alpha is internal test dogfood; Beta is customer test.

Re:Status bar?

[Omestes]

Yeah, like that whole Panorama awesomeness they stole from Chrome. Oh, wait.

Wow, a place where my tabs can go to die in obscurity! Why the hell isn't Panorama an extension? I personally don't care about it, and will never use it; but when the whole project started wasn't the point to make a completely basic, fast, browser, and add all the other features as optional extensions?

Also, if they're trying to make more room from actual content by trimming the GUI, why did they make their little "Firefox" menu thing take up extra room instead of sticking it in some pre-existing area of the interface?

Re:Status bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides that, it took Firefox 4 Beta 12 for that?? I guess I'm not familiar with that browser for some good reasons..

Re:Status bar?

[Lanteran]

blew all the mod points on another article, hopefully everyone else is browsing uncut and raw. Anyway, I'd say it looks like it's copying opera much more than chrome- at least interface wise. Otherwise- yeah, it's a disturbing trend in firefox's development. Used to be they'd come up with some killer feature to dominate the browser market, but they've become followers. Unfortunately, I dislike both opera and chrome, so I'll probably just fork & update a version of ice weasel pre-4.0 with whatever I think needs doing.

Re:Status bar?

[hkmwbz]

I thought RC was when the product is supposed to be ready for shipping, unless someone finds a really nasty bug that blocks the release...

and

[Anonymous Coward]

what about my links i used OT be able to place under grow location bar for ease of use....they seem to be done too.
if they want to be chrome just stop making firefox and hand it over to chrome .

no status bar also = i no use

Re:and

[SilverHatHacker]

The bookmarks toolbar is still there, and any time there's anything that needs to be seen a "status bubble" appears on the bottom. So yeah, you can use it again.

Re:and

[tqk]

... no status bar also = i no use

What a loser. Aspire to higher things, already.

Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[grimboryn]

Haha. I just switched back to 3.x yesterday because of that insane leak. Guess I'm off to check the new shiny thing...

Re:Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[Anonymous Coward]

That memory leak didn't seem to have any effect on my end. The memory stayed pretty steady.

Re:Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[afidel]

Try Chrome Beta 10 as well, now that adblock and flashblock can actually stop stuff instead of just hiding them it's awesome. Extremely fast, memory use appears to be the same as FF 3.6 for the same number of tabs yet when I close a tab the memory really gets released.

Re:Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[TaoPhoenix]

It used to be if you were logged in somewhere likeslashdot but you closed the browser, when you went back you were still logged in. Now it seems to be doing hourglass-stuff on close, and it is making me re-login. Is that the far side of fixing the "memory leak"?

Re:Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[Seumas]

I'm just glad they acknowledged it. I noticed, last week that my browser was using 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. I couldn't figure it out. So I watched the process for a bit and saw that it was consuming about three megabytes more per minute, even while it was not being used. I went away for lunch and a few errands and came back to find it hitting 2gb.

Re:Memory leak? More like gaping hole

[tsa]

No, that's a safety feature.

Holy Smokes

[Das Auge]

I tried this on an alpha of Natty Narwhal. Everything happened so freakin' quick. From opening to loading the add-on tab (no longer a pop-up) to loading a page, everything happened so fast I might as well call it instantaneous. I'm really looking forward to using this when I upgrade to the non-alpha of Ubuntu 11.04.

Pet Peeve

[zixxt]

The fonts are still blurry under windows 7, fix it Mozilla please!

Re:Pet Peeve

[Anonymous Coward]

Tools, Options, Advanced, General, and uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available."

Now fonts will be rendered using the Windows font rendering system and not whatever horrible piece of shit Firefox 4 uses for hardware acceleration.

Of course, you'll no longer be able to play those 1337 HTML 5 games, such as ...um..., but I think that's a small price to pay for being able to actually READ TEXT IN A FUCKING WEB BROWSER.

I mean, kick-ass 1337 SUPER 3D GRAPHICS, or legible text. It's a hard choice.

Re:Pet Peeve

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Now fonts will be rendered using the Windows font rendering system and not whatever horrible piece of shit Firefox 4 uses for hardware acceleration.

Not a Mozilla issue, but an issue with Microsoft's DirectWrite. IE9 looks the same.

Re:Pet Peeve

[zixxt]

Now fonts will be rendered using the Windows font rendering system and not whatever horrible piece of shit Firefox 4 uses for hardware acceleration.

Not a Mozilla issue, but an issue with Microsoft's DirectWrite. IE9 looks the same.

Funny thing is I never had and/or have this issue with IE9 beta at all.....

Re:Pet Peeve

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice. Glad to know what the cause is.

Except you're flat-out wrong about it not being a Mozilla issue.

Really, I don't care WHY text is blurry crap in Firefox 4, only that it IS. Since the 3D acceleration features are basically worthless, I'll continue to leave them disabled until either Mozilla comes up with some other technology to use instead of DirectWrite or Microsoft fixes DirectWrite itself.

Re:Pet Peeve

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click on the desktop or start menu icon, select the "properties" tab, and check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings".

Re:Pet Peeve

[WeatherGod]

You do realize that slashdot is not the bug tracker for Firefox, right?

Re:Pet Peeve

[Skuto]

Not only under Windows 7 (Vista here). And yes, it's really weird that they ship the browser with default settings that make webpages look like shit!

Re:Pet Peeve

[perryizgr8]

fonts look nice in ie9. its firefox doing some sort of shit.

"At last!" ...Really?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

We're now "at last!"-ing one of several beta releases? Can we at least save that for the final release? Please?

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that Firefox 4 was supposed to be released in November 2010, no, wait, scratch that, February 2011, no wait, who knows when - yeah, "at last" is starting to sound appropriate for beta releases.

Especially ones where they manage to, *gasp*, listen to user feedback and change functionality that user's universally hated.

Of course, they still did in an ass way and it's still not back to working the way it's supposed to, but, whatever. At least they met the user's half way.

Now if only they'd listen to us and ditch the AwfulBar...

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[rudy_wayne]

Considering that Firefox 4 was supposed to be released in November 2010, no, wait, scratch that, February 2011, no wait, who knows when -

Don't worry. Firefox 5, 6 and 7 will be released this year!!

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[multipartmixed]

This is expected to be the last beta.

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[billcopc]

I'll be "at last!"-ing when they hit 4.5. If there's one thing the Mozilla org sucks at, it's .0 releases. Thunderbird is still a clusterfuck. Mozilla 3.6 actually isn't too terrible, but everything up to it was pokey.

I frankly still don't understand what's so damned hard about building a browser, but I haven't tried to do that since HTML 3 was all the rage, so I'm not exactly in a position to point fingers.

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[basotl]

But I like the Awesomebar.

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[thsths]

> Considering that Firefox 4 was supposed to be released in November 2010

It was August 2010. And recently reaffirmed plans to release Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 in 2011. To an outsider like me that looks like an idiot is in charge (or a committee, which is effectively the same thing...).

Re:"At last!" ...Really?

[thsths]

> If there's one thing the Mozilla org sucks at, it's .0 releases.

That's true. Firefox 1.0 was only good because it was finally there. 2.0 was a mitigated disaster. 3.0 wasn't half bad, to be honest. 4.0 is certainly long awaited, but I am sure it will underwhelm as usual.

But there's no status bar

[neo00]

the URL is displayed in the status bar, instead of the location bar."

The URL is actually displayed at the bottom of the page in a "pseudo-status-bar" overlaying the page contents. And guess what happens if the background of the page at that area is dark or matching the URL font color.!
Do I see phishing attacks coming soon?

Re:But there's no status bar

[gbjbaanb]

its still better than the in-the-address-bar approach, as that wasn't long enough to show the full url. At least with the "status-tooltip" they can fiddle with borders, highlights, shadows and suchlike until they get something that looks smart.

Re:But there's no status bar

[ianezz]

its still better than the in-the-address-bar approach

Uhm, but now a malicious page can probably display a fake destination just by using CSS and Javascript (just make up a pop-up at the bottom left corner of the window).

Re:But there's no status bar

[Anonymous Coward]

its still better than the in-the-address-bar approach

Uhm, but now a malicious page can probably display a fake destination just by using CSS and Javascript (just make up a pop-up at the bottom left corner of the window).

Funny how people ignore this aspect of this new "Feature."

Re:But there's no status bar

[Lord Byron II]

The FF popup will be on top of any page content. So the malicious website can try this, but it won't be visible.

Re:But there's no status bar

[arielCo]

Make sure the tooltip-thingy is shown on top of ev-verything. Like, the equivalent of z-index:MAXINT . Anyway, most Joe Users I've met don't even look at the status bar when they click, so the issue is already here.

Re:But there's no status bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I have actually just raised a bug to get this change revoked - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=637017

One of the several reasons I gave was the possibility of malware attacks.

Re:But there's no status bar

[mrmeval]

They're doing fartistic things with it. I tried 4 for a few minutes, it looks and acts like IE8 but slower. I could not see anyway to reskin or adjust it to act like firefox 3 so I scraped that pablum off my system.

Re:But there's no status bar

[neo00]

A malicious page can have a fake link - text that looks like a link, shows the URL on the bottom of the page using JS when mouse is over the fake link. FF won't hide that with its own popup since it's not a real link.
I can also give more complex scenarios based on the fact that FF shows the URL transparently. (Think about floating

with transparent or no background color). In other words it doesn't hide the page contents in the back.

Re:But there's no status bar

[neo00]

OK, correcting myself in one point. My claim that the url popup was transparent turned out to so because of KDE Oxigen them I'm using with FF. Reverting to the default FF4b12 theme, the URL popup does hide the contents behind it.
However, the other scenario I raised about fake links is still very plausible IMHO.

Re:But there's no status bar

[jorgevillalobos]

Um, the text is inside a box, not floating on its own. Changing the background color of the page won't have any effect.

It'd be interesting to try to tack something to the left of the floating box. With the right alignment and styling it could be a cause for concern.

Re:But there's no status bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's far less visible than when it's displayed in the location bar. The location bar is also a more natural place for general users to look at for the url.

Typically, I'm not bothered about the full url either - I'm certainly not bothered about looking at large numbers of parameters. The domain is the most important thing, to see what site it's linking to. The start of the path is quite handy too, but not so important.

And rather than pandering to those that produce really long, complicated and ugly urls, it is good to encourage the use of shorter links. Besides, you could get more space for the location bar by adopting the Chrome combo-box approach.

Personally, I thought the preview appearing in the location bar was one of the nicer aspects of the new Firefox, and by relegating it to a status pop-up at the bottom of the page, this is [imho] making things worse for the large group of users that we should be trying to help.

Opposite the current URL address? UNDO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway to get the hovered link's URL to appear in the URL bar instead of the bottom of the screen?
Like in the previous versions of Firefox Beta 4?
I'd rather keep such information clustered with related information, like the current URL address.

Re:Opposite the current URL address? UNDO?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely. The URL bar is the perfect place to show things like, just maybe, URLs. The old location was absolutely brilliant, and I'd hate to see it not even exist as an option.

Too late, Mozilla. Chrome already won me over

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least SRWare Iron did.

What's the point?

[FLEABttn]

So, if b12 has no set release date aside from "when there are no more hard blockers", why release it with 9 or 10 hard blockers remaining, with the promise of a b13 down the road? The entire point of not having a release date was so you could actually finish the thing. Perhaps I am ignorant in the ways of software releasing, but this release doesn't seem to have much of a purpose.

Re:What's the point?

[TaoPhoenix]

In some ways this is more like the Minefield alpha channel, except they are calling them betas. I'm curious to see what 650 bug fixes solve!

Now that they are close, they can start to do harder tests having gotten the churn down.

Re:What's the point?

[rudy_wayne]

I'm curious to see what 650 bug fixes solve!

Bug 355071 - Flash stops keyboard input in other FF windows (TSM doc problem)
originally submitted: 2006-10-01

Re:What's the point?

[Almost-Retired]

So, if b12 has no set release date aside from "when there are no more hard blockers", why release it with 9 or 10 hard blockers remaining, with the promise of a b13 down the road? The entire point of not having a release date was so you could actually finish the thing.

Perhaps I am ignorant in the ways of software releasing, but this release doesn't seem to have much of a purpose.</quote>

You must be new here then. I first heard it said sometime back in cpm days, what, 30 years ago, that the only time a program was ever declared finished was when someone shot the last developer.

I think it is still a basic truism.

--
Cheers, Gene
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
NT (as in Windows NT) is short for Nasty Technology

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

A fixed release date doesn't guarantee the program will be finished. It just forces you to release with a bunch of horrible bugs.

Re:What's the point?

[BZ]

b12 was released when all the hard blockers that needed beta exposure (as in, could result in web compat issues and such) were fixed.

The remaining hard blockers are ones where the fix is expected to be very safe and extremely unlikely to cause compat or user-facing problems. So it's OK to go directly to RC after fixing them, instead of having yet more beta testing.

Re:What's the point?

[yuhong]

From the bug itself:

Masayuki Nakano (Mozilla Japan) 2011-02-01 22:21:58 PST
Steven, why is this still open?

Steven Michaud 2011-02-02 08:59:21 PST
I probably just forgot to close it ... so I'll do that now.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those blockers aren't deemed significant enough to warrant another beta, so they will be fixed in RC1. If no more significant bugs are found it will ship as version 4 without further modification.

Otherwise they create a RC2 (and repeat the cycle again).

Still using Firefox 3

[cstanley8899]

Wow. Looks like you guys have had a rough time. Firefox 3 is stable as can be.

And you download it from where?

[spacey]

Firefox has always had the most frustrating UI for their info pages. They'll send you to pages and pages of info, but there's never a standard sidebar to actually download the available versions. The page this article links to has a link to the mobile beta of 4, which is exactly not the platform I'm browsing from. Fail.

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

help->about firefox->check for updates

after a couple seconds it prompts to restart to apply the update.

Re:And you download it from where?

[t0y]

That's the landing page you get after installing it.
Try https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

www.getfirefox.com

Re:And you download it from where?

[subreality]

http://firefox.com/ , and then look for "Try the new Firefox 4 Beta! Free download" under the big green download link.

Yeah, it's not the standard software website UI, but I'd not call it "the most frustrating".

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

Found this page explaining how to update

Has to be one of the stranger ways to update something that I've seen.

Re:And you download it from where?

[failedlogic]

Yep, works for me.

Re:And you download it from where?

[Pascal Sartoretti]

It is a beta. If you have trouble finding and downloading it, then maybe you should not use it :-)

-- posted from FireFox Beta 12

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the page that you are referring to is actually the page that you get sent to AFTER downloading and installing it, not before.

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

in google type download firefox 4

Re:And you download it from where?

[drinkypoo]

If you want to know where to download it, perhaps you should give us more information. I personally wanted to run dailies on Ubuntu so I googled "firefox ppa" and the first link was "https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa" which is precisely what I wanted. Add it and install firefox-4.0 and you get a minefield icon. Clicky clicky. But maybe you were using some inferior OS :) Note that the daily is on b13 right now...

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

until you want the 64bit version and resort to a google search ;)

Re:And you download it from where?

[echucker]

Except if you are running AdBlock Plus, and don't trust mozilla.com, there is no big green link. It's a smaller text link underneath the normal download links for the standard releases.

Re:And you download it from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be hard going through life as an idiot

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

still corrupts the screen

[mojo-raisin]

It still corrupts my desktop background and the Taskbar on my Windows7 laptop.

I have to change the size of the Taskbar to make my computer not look retarded after using FF.

Re:still corrupts the screen

[t0y]

Update your graphics card drivers or disable hardware acceleration. They could use a bug report with information you get from when you type about:support in the location bar, though. If it's as bad as you say that card/driver combo should be blacklisted

Works for me, actually.

[aussersterne]

They might have just kept a user.

Every FF4 beta before this simply didn't work on Mac OS X either with my desktop or my MacBook Pro. Up until about b8, it would suck 100% CPU usage (both cores) and do absolutely nothing in exchange, and I'd have to go to the command line and issue a SIGKILL to get my machine back. With b9-b11, it worked in theory, but all window and UI updates weren't actually "drawn" on the screen, needing a refresh in order to appear. In practical terms, any change to window contents was invisible until the window was dragged. This meant that trying to use FF4 even after the CPU issue was fixed was pointless because of the totally nonfunctional UI: click, then wait some abitrary amount of time (because you can't see any updates in the window to tell you how things are progressing), then drag the window a millimeter or two, if it's not done, wait a while longer and drag again, if it is done, begin again with click, then wait... no way to choose what's in a drop-down list because you click, you can't see it until you drag the window, but you click the window title bar and of course the drop-down closes... etc.

I'd switched entirely to Chrome for day-to-day browsing but kept FF4 around until b11 and finally last night just blew it away entirely along with my user data on the MacBook. The b12 release is the first FF4 that I can actually use to get some sense of FF4 as a browser and I saw the Slashdot story just as I was about to blow FF4 away on my desktop, too.

My first reaction is that it's plenty fast and actually has a much nicer *looking* UI than all previous FF releases, but my immediate caveats are (1) but it's ass-backward to fix such a critical bug for any testing or use cases all the way down the list at the b12 stage, (2) none of the most important plugins for my workflow are FF4-ready yet, and (3) now I'm really, really happy with Chrome and wonder whether I can be brought back. FF4 is faster, but only slightly. Chrome, on the other hand, is cleaner, lighter, and more intuitive.

Can the floating URL display be faked?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until some naughty person hovers a fake URL box on top of the real one? To trick people into not knowing what they're clicking on?

Click the "Release Notes"

[Troll-Under-D'Bridge]

Yeah, there should be a big button, right on the release announcement page, labeled "Download" for the OS/Architecture of the browser you're currently running. But the download's not that far off. For those to tired or lazy to look, the link to the download page is right under the link for "Release Notes". (This might be a case of deliberate obfuscation, since this is a beta that you don't want to mistake for a supported official release.)

I kind of like BTW the sci-fi theme of the page background, where you got this team of people fixing or unloading things off their hovercars.

Status bar

[Anonymous Coward]

So now I have a "plugins bar" that only has a few little things in it (mostly empty space) and an annoying little piece of text that pops up every time I mouse-over something. Just bring back the damn STATUS BAR and put the mouse-over links in there! The way it is currently implemented, not only is it distracting and a waste of real estate, it lends itself to phishing attacks as well.

Re:Status bar

[Elbereth]

And we thought that FF 3.x was underwhelming, with the awfulbar. If only we could have seen what was coming in the next release...

Scrolling kinda sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta say, IE9 and Chrome 11 perform better while scrolling through text. :/

Fixes Over 650 Bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of which were probably not even there before they broke the fast and snappy Firefox version 2.

Holy its fast

[failedlogic]

Holy crap this is fast! This is probably the best FF release ever. I used to use Opera because I felt it was faster at loading pages. FF used to take a few seconds to properly load up and display a page. Now it loads up so fast I don't even blink before its totally done rendering the page. And its uber fast with scrolling pages. I'm using this on Windows.

Thanks for these updates Devs! And keep up the superb work!

Re:christian louboutin shoes

[Joe Jay Bee]

My jesus, we have blogspam on Slashdot.

Welp, this site just jumped the shark.

IBM HMC compat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it fully work with IBM's HMC yet?

Memory leak in FF3

[wiredlogic]

Maybe it's just me but at some point in the last year FF3 started leaking tons of memory in long lived windows with a lot of activity. Has this issue been taken care of as well?

Re:Memory leak in FF3

[UnknownSoldier]

> Maybe it's just me but at some point in the last year FF3 started leaking tons of memory ...

I've been using FF since 1.0.4. The dam thing has _always_ leaked memory (you can easily trigger this when using multiple tabs containing videos.)

I leave the browser open for _weeks_ at a time. Once it hits the 1 GB ~ 1.5 GB usage, I kill it, re-open it, and memory is back down to 200 MB ~ 400 MB. IMHO their garbage collector is broken. If I've just closed a tab, the chances of me wanting to re-open it, are higher the less time it has been, so I could see some memory being "still in use." If I closed a tab, and it's been a week, chances are, I don't want to re-open it -- and all memory should be released (and garbage collected.) It's like the devs never keep their browser open for more then a day at time, so they never see the memory problems when the browser is USED and OPEN for a month at a time.

FF3 doesn't seem nearly as bad as the 1.x series was. I'm hoping FF4 finally fixes this memory bug. Anyone else use the browser for weeks at a time?

Cheers

Re:Memory leak in FF3

[multipartmixed]

I can't tell you if FF4 will fix your bug or not, but I *can* tell you that GC has been receiving a *lot* of attention from Moz, and there are more improvements planned not long after the ff4 release.

That said, the GC itself is not broken: the collector does release all unused resources (unlike the one in IE6 which can get fooled by circular references). However, this does not mean that memory is not incorrectly entrained, causing the growth you're seeing.

I've been using the betas for a few months and haven't seen any significant memory issues, except when using Firebug (which is also in beta).

Then they still have a long way to go...

[SirMasterboy]

I've heard countless times in Software Engineering literature that for every bug you find, there is probably another still out there.

Finding lots of bugs so quickly isn't actually such a great thing.

Re:Then they still have a long way to go...

[Nagrom]

Pretty much all software projects fix a massive number of bugs within the final portion of their development; that's pretty much all that's happening at that point and a huge proportion of it is the backlog of stuff that got left while features were still being added or finished. And your anecdote is more or less correct as well in that often a bug is hiding or distracting from others or fixing one actually introduces another so there's a lot of churn during this period. Few projects actually finish this process but instead just fix bugs largely in order of priority and then stop when there's not enough serious stuff left to hold up release any longer. If anything, Mozilla are more conscientious about this than most, I suppose partly because of the fact that they're so open about their process. (You don't even want to know about some of the bugs that will get skipped in commercial stuff. 'Known shippable' quickly becomes the most common phrase you hear towards the end. How do you think any of Bethesda's in-house product ever gets out the door?)

Re:Then they still have a long way to go...

[BZ]

You're confusing "finding" and "fixing"...

Re:"At last!"? Yeah, if it stops crashing!

[billstewart]

I've been under the impression that memory leak problems were getting better the last few betas, but FF still does the "burn the whole CPU core" trick, and Beta11 has been crashing a couple of times a day on me. So, yeah, "at last"....

Mod Parent Not Troll Please? I agree with him

[billstewart]

It took me a while to get used to having the hovered links' URLs displayed in the URL bar, but I've been deciding I kind of like it.

Incorrect summary

[Pascal Sartoretti]

when you hover over a link, the URL is displayed in the status bar, instead of the location bar

No, it is displayed at the bottom of the window. There is no status bar anymore.

Re:Incorrect summary

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no status bar anymore.

So where's the add-on to put it back?

Re:Incorrect summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain this URL status bar issue? I'm reading this using Firefox 3 and the URL's are displayed at the bottom of the window, it seems to work just fine and as it allocates the entire width of the window for this I can't see how the new version improves things

Re:Incorrect summary

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Can someone explain this URL status bar issue? I'm reading this using Firefox 3 and the URL's are displayed at the bottom of the window, it seems to work just fine and as it allocates the entire width of the window for this I can't see how the new version improves things

Removing the status bar saved a little vertical space. With today's monitors being wider than taller, I see this as a good thing.

Oh, Snap! Chrome keeps failing for me!

[billstewart]

I keep a lot of windows with a lot of tabs open most of the time, depending on what I'm working on or reading about at any time. Currently about half my tabs are in Chrome and about half in Firefox, with 8-10 windows each. Firefox has been crashing a lot the last couple of betas, so I've been moving the more stable stuff over to the Chrome windows, but there are some things that cause Chrome to fail badly.

Go to a news aggregator site, such as Fark or sometimes Google News. Open 50-100 links in new tabs, and then try to read them. Because it's a news aggregator, there'll be pages from lots of different sites, with lots of different Flash and Javascript garbage and lots of different kinds of advertising and occasional video. (That's what gets through _after_ using AdBlock and NoScript and Ghostery, but for a bunch of news sites I do have Javascript allowed because otherwise they're unreadable.) Firefox mostly succeeds, at the cost of some memory leaks and CPU burn, and if it fails, it crashes, and when you restart and restore most of the links work pretty cleanly. And if it's totally hosed but doesn't quite die, you can go to Task Manager to kill it. With Chrome, it's been much faster and cleaner, but at some point it'll get upset about something and all the tabs turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page - and there's no clean way to make it redraw them.

NoScript

[Lazy Jones]

My guess is that NoScript causes this, I am having huge issus with it (presumably) getting FF to grow to 1.5GB RAM and beyond ...

Re:NoScript

[Teknikal69]

I ditched noscript a while back because of the ridiculous number of updates no doubt solely to generate Ad revenue. I'm still suprised there no real alternative to it or if there is it's passed me by, I do think it's a good idea I just hate the constant updating.

I stopped using firefox a while ago though when they announced the gui change although in a way they still have me because I'm mostly using Palemoon lately and hoping they keep things simple but I do have K-Meleon as a fallback. I guess you could consider my alternatives basicly firefox anyway I wish epiphany was on windows I just want a simple lightweight browser with a traditional layout and a few plugins like adblock and greasemonkey.

Spammers Love christian louboutin shoes

[billstewart]

You'd think with user IDs in the 7 digits that Slashdot would be a small tightly-knit community where nobody would be willing to risk their karma by doing something like that.... But nooooo, we've got spammers even here!

Räphael

[snookiex]

Finally the labyrinth example of Räphael Javascript library works smoothly. That and the status bar thing were keeping me from switching again to FF.

Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Switched to Chrome. I need a real reason to switch back. Fixing what should have never been broken isn't a reason to switch.

Had MS pulled the same bullshit there would be about 90% of all comments that read just like this one but FF gets a free pass? Kiss my ass, fanbois. FF is needless bloat and you know it.

Yow! Apparently it still crashes! Ugly!

[billstewart]

I just updated, and ran my usual browser reliability test on it - with my normal 10 or so windows and 100-200 tabs open, go to Fark.com, open the first 50-100 news articles in tabs, wait for it to stabilize, then read them. It burned a bit of CPU briefly, then froze hard - burned 1.5GB of RAM and I couldn't get it to respond to anything at all. Unlike in the past, the CPU was basically idle, but Firefox was frozen much harder than usual.

Tell me this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many bugs of the 20 open bugs older than 5 years and having more than 50 votes are fixed? Ya, that's what I thought.

Thanks for the memory (leaks)

[Cameleopard]

Do any of the bugfixes address the gaping memory leak problem that's been with the program for years now? I often see addons being blamed for leaking memory, but I've used Firefox on a number of different systems with and without addons and it's been a consistent problem throughout.

Re:Thanks for the memory (leaks)

[cerberusss]

I don't see any of that and I'm using FireFox on OS X and Linux, with tons of extensions. So there.

Re:Thanks for the memory (leaks)

[mmj638]

When you refer to memory leaks, are you actually just referring to "using" memory?

Memory is cheap - I'd rather use a browser which makes the most of my *unused* memory and gives me a responsive interface, thanks.

As long as an app is not using up all unused memory and then needing even more, forcing the OS to swap or worse (OOM). But a smart app need not do this.

Re:Thanks for the memory (leaks)

[edmicman]

2008 called, they want their Firefox-has-memory-leaks argument back...

URL should stay in locationbar

[shadowthunder]

I greatly preferred having the URL displayed in the menu-bar rather than the bottom of the window, Chrome-style. It made a helluva lot more sense to have the "next" URL next to the current one.

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[Vegemeister]

Except for being low-contrast light grey text and not showing the whole url, yeah.

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[Arancaytar]

Except for the insufficient horizontal screen space to show two medium-length URLs end to end.

By the way, when I hover over a link, Chrome shows the URL in the lower left where other browsers have a status bar.

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[shadowthunder]

What do you need to see them end-to-end for? Only a couple things are important: file type, protocol, and domain, and there's plenty of room for two to show that once you get rid of the search bar. Yes, I know; showing it where the status bar would be, but not actually having the status bar is what I meant by "Chrome-style".

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[shadowthunder]

Only a couple things are important in a URL: file type, protocol, and domain, and there's plenty of room for two to show that once you get rid of the search bar. I never had any issues, though I suppose they could have darkened it. It _is_ taking me a moment to scan the URL in the bottom-left corner when it doesn't have ample white-space in the background and is so damn close to the much more colorful and therefore eye-attracting taskbar in Windows.

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[kwoff]

I downgraded to 3 because of the status bar change. They should make it customizable, and not change the default from like the last 18 years. (Same with the Ubuntu window-close buttons.)

Re:URL should stay in locationbar

[shadowthunder]

Just because it's been like that for the past 18 years, that doesn't mean that's the best solution. I looked kindly upon getting rid of the status bar because there wasn't anything down there that I would need to see any every given moment of browsing the web:

AdBlock's enabled, but I don't need to see that it is at any given moment. It stays enabled until I disable it and vice-versa.
NoScript is blocking content on the page, but I don't need an icon to tell me that; that much is apparent from something not loading, and is easy to change by right-clicking. My context menu is trimmed to the items I need, so adding functionality that I change all the time (but doesn't change on its own) to it is works very well.

Greasemonkey, Xmarks (now mostly obsolete by Firefox Sync), MasterPassword+, mass download managers, YouTube downloaders, etc., they all are either "set and forget"-type extensions, so you don't need to constantly monitor their statuses and can just trust them to do their jobs, or are context-sensitive, meaning they only act upon certain parts of a site, and therefore belong in your context menu.

I think you should give "no status bar" a shot, something longer than a 30 minute trial run; make it your primary browser for a week before you judge it.

Still, if Mozilla removes all the information from the bottom of the screen, they can't just leave one thing that _really_ doesn't belong there.

Re:Oh, Snap! Chrome keeps failing for me!

[Elbereth]

Go to a news aggregator site, such as Fark or sometimes Google News. Open 50-100 links in new tabs,

What the hell is wrong with people like you? Why do you do that? My ex-girlfriend did that, and it perplexed me to no end. Stop doing that. I bet you're the kind of person who drives 150 mph and then complains that it's hard to steer.

Re:Yow! Apparently it still crashes! Ugly!

[Anonymous Coward]

with my normal 10 or so windows and 100-200 tabs open, go to Fark.com, open the first 50-100 news articles in tabs, wait for it to stabilize, then read them.

A big fat 'Why?!' to all of that.

Wouldn't it be at least as efficient to just open and read one article at a time?

Tears of happiness

[Vlijmen Fileer]

I almost cried of happiness when I saw they fixed the position of the URL info.
It is behavioiur that is in stark contrast with that of e.g. Gnome, which never listens to "user uprisings", or Ubuntu, which moved the 3 window title buttons to the wrong location and, despite fully justified comments on this, never even thought of correcting that bug.
Good to see there are still development teams that listen to reason.

Re:Tears of happiness

[Nagrom]

On the one hand I preferred it down there. On the other I just spent a few weeks with the recent couple of betas getting used to looking up instead of down when I moused over anything and now it's probably going to take at least another couple to retrain myself!

Re:Tears of happiness

[Omestes]

Ubuntu, which moved the 3 window title buttons to the wrong location

Gah, I hate this! Is there an objectively right and wrong placement of windows controls? When did this happen, and how was it justified?

You don't like it, that doesn't make it right or wrong. I personally don't like them on the right, so... therefore... our opinions nullify the whole damn debate and people are free to stick there buttons where ever they like.

Its all about the options. Let users decide what they want if your defaults don't work for them. Before Ubuntu switched their buttons to the left, I always did it manually any way (oh no, a whole 2-3 minutes of work every 6 months to a year!). I also have a Mac sitting around somewhere with the same setup. If I could switch the window controls on my Win7 boxes, I would (I personally hate the task bar being on the bottom, it clearly should be on the right!).

sucks big time

[Anonymous Coward]

it sucks big time ...had to go back...links didin't work...desktop icons didin't work....searches didin't work!!!

Bugzilla link + vote

[Skuto]

This is the relevant bug. The developers don't seem to think this is a serious issue. So feel free to upvote it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635490

Hope this makes FF4 useable!

[GNious]

That RAM thing could explain why leaving it unused for 1 day, FF4 would make my MBA be useless and FF having to be killed explicitly since it had stopped responding. Now, to understand the CPU consumption...
(I checked - it aint due to plugins, since these are shared with FF3 and there the problem is much less pronounced)

Re:Yow! Apparently it still crashes! Ugly!

[steeviant]

Hey it's better than printing out each article and then setting it on fire like once he's read it, like he used to do.

ugh you guys suck...

[Anonymous Coward]

i started using FF4 and thought it was pretty cool change to have the destination url in the URL bar when hovering over a link.
Sorry, but I like little nifty UI changes that try to make things a little different than the other folks' software.

Re:Oh, Snap! Chrome keeps failing for me!

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Although it usually numbers more in the 40-50 link range, I do it as well. Open a page, middle click every link that looks interesting and then read and close them one by one. Definitely seems like the most efficient use of tabs to me.

I was OK with the URL on the location bar

[thyristor pt]

The URL of the hovered link made sense up there, and the implementation was even better because we could see the end of the URL. Now in beta 12 I can't see if I'm clicking a link to a .exe file or to an html page.... when the link url is long enough. I wish I could have an option to display it back to the location bar. Besides, the new method doesn't show the url in the status bar. Even if I turn it on it still displays in a little popup in the lower screen.

Firefox? HAHAHAHA

[tarzeau]

Unless they add a real time edit css/html and display, this is just a big disaster of software project. Luckily there's Google Chrome and Chromium. Mozilla didn't manage to fix some bugs in their code since > 5 years, that makes it a hell to use if you've got your config files on NFS.

Craziness.

[crhylove]

I see a lot of complaining posts, but let's be real here:

If it wasn't for firefox we'd all be stuck on some crappy upgrade to IE 4. Not only that, it's free, open source, has an awesome plug in structure (I can't live without Adblock).

Firefox is STILL the best browser out and I use it every day. I would never settle for Chrome or another closed source option.

STFU already. YAY MOZILLA!

Lots of trolls - troll hunting.

[lksd]

Why don't you all trolls go hide in the woods of 'doing nothing thinking i know everything'. 1. Download Firefox 4b12, Opera 11.01 and latest Chrome (beta or dev). 2. Run speed test. 3. Benchmark Java Script performance. 4. Benchmark flash player. 5. Check how flash playback (youtube) works - is it fluent, hiccups (opera has problem caching flash = youtube hiccups). 6. Check if it can load all images http://stevesouders.com/hpws/max-connections.php - http timeout :). 7. Compare UI performance look and feel. When you do all that instead of looking at screenshots, and reading other people opinions, post a comment. Hell Chrome is just a copy of Opera web browser, opera first introduced tabs, yes it is a definitely a copy... trolls.

New bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

But - how many new bugs are put in?

I take it back.

[aussersterne]

Now it appears to update/refresh fine as you work, but then suddenly stops at some random point an hour or two into your use session and you're back to I-have-to-drag-Firefox-1mm-to-the-right-or-left-each-time-I-want-an-update territory.

Would be nice if they could get basic functionality like drawing on the screen down once and for all.

Re:Oh, Snap! Chrome keeps failing for me!

[knarf]

My experience with Chromium (I have not tried any Google-branded versions) is that it gets bogged down loading tabs in the background and stays unresponsive until the last tab has finished loading, where Firefox slows down but stays responsive. While Chromium might shine on multicore and/or multiprocessor machines in my experience it loses out to Firefox/Seamonkey on single-processor hardware. This has made me use Chromium for 'quick' browsing fixes - look up that address while no browser happens to be running - while I keep to Firefox or Seamonkey for the long haul sessions.

Firefox has lost my trust

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox for me is still the best browser around but more and more the UI is less and less of what I as an end user wants to see. The "Awesome" bar was the first major misstep, copying Chrome UI is the next. I would beg for more UI customization instead of forced adoption of a specific UI... unfortunately unless you're a dev they don't seem to listen (as I'm frequently copied on 5-6 year old bugs that don't get fixed)

clapping....

[hesaigo999ca]

I am applauding their efforts, and hope they continue to make this amazing product even more so.

Reading efficiency

[billstewart]

WIth a browser that behaves itself, no, it's much more efficient to start opening articles and then read them.

• Part of it's because articles on many news sites take a while to load all their pieces, so reading them one at a time as opposed to queuing them means that you have to wait for that,
• part of it's that by queuing them you don't have to keep track of where you were after reading each one,
• part of it's that the selection and reading are different mental processes, so it's more efficient to do all the selection in one shot rather than context-switch back and forth,
• part of it's that I may not read all the articles in one session - this queues up a bunch of stuff to read in between doing other things.

Re:Yow! Apparently it still crashes! Ugly!

[billstewart]

Hey, I do miss setting them on fire :-) Back in the 80s, there were a couple of years where I could read Netnews by printing it all out on dead trees (double-sided 4-up using the big Xerox printer in the basement computer lab), and a bit later when I could still print out everything but net.singles, which was a fairly verbose newsgroup. It was much faster than reading it at 1200 baud, but eventually Netnews got too big to read the whole thing, and morphed into Usenet and later into Google Groups.