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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."
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.
#DeleteChrome
Like Chrome does. It just puts a little textbox showing the URL in the bottom.
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?
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
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.
== Just my opinion(s)
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
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.....
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I thought experiments were carried out during the alpha phase, and the beta phase was only supposed to be used to fix bugs...
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Yeah, like that whole Panorama awesomeness they stole from Chrome. Oh, wait.