Firefox 4 RC1 Released

IgnitusBoyone writes "Mozilla has now released Firefox 4 RC1. For most beta participants the update should be automatic, but for those holding out until it gets closer to feature freeze, now is likely a good time to test the next major release. Aside from a complete redesign of the user interface, Firefox 4 offers several new features (release notes) including an integrated sync manager, improved methods for tab-switching and organization for tab-heavy users."

Comments

UI is still sluggish

[devxo]

It looks like they made Firefox look exactly like Chrome. However, there is one problem - Firefox's UI still feels sluggish, just like before. Personally I love how fast Opera's UI is and it makes the browser feel lightweight too. Chrome is close to that, but both IE and Firefox lag behind. Maybe it's XUL or something else, but it needs to be improved.

Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Shikaku]

HTML5 H.264 videos

Where? The only site is Youtube, and it's beta and for testing. Name a site with over 10000 visits per html5 video that has regular support for HTML5 h264 video.

I'll give you a hint, it's a loaded question because no sane site advertises full support for this because it's not a set standard yet!

Re:UI is still sluggish

[devxo]

Real open standards won you all just don't know it yet.

H.264 is supported universally in millions of devices, from mobile phones to professional video editing hardware, consoles and HDTV's. WebM is too late in to the game this round. They still have a change to gain it in future codecs, but now H.264 has already won.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[devxo]

Well, YouTube for example. If you stream using iPhone, you get H.264. In fact, you get H.264 even with the normal flash player.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Chrisq]

Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

Not for long though, google chrome is also dropping this patent trap.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[GooberToo]

Why are they, "too late", when ever indicator, and I mean every indicator, says the exact opposite of what you're saying? So why should we listen to you versus the market forces which are actually shaping, you know, the market?

Re:UI is still sluggish

[GooberToo]

With that logic, the Internet doesn't exist.

HTML5 is an emerging standard. You're argument is it can't be because the world doesn't look like what didn't exist. WTF? I don't think you understand how technology adoption works.

YouTube is an extremely huge chunk of the online video market. WebM is finally becoming available on hardware. Future generation hardware is likely to provide yet additional performance boosts. Video quality has achieved parity with H.264. WebM is faster to decode than H.264 and likely to be much, much faster in future releases. This means better battery life when compared to H.264. WebM is now multi-core ready and likely to continue to increase its scalability in the future.

About the only place H.264 has a clear advantage over WebM is its significantly faster at encoding. But frankly, given the ratio of content creation to consumption, I'm honestly not sure that matters for the vast, vast majority of consumers.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[drinkypoo]

It looks like they made Firefox look exactly like Chrome. However, there is one problem - Firefox's UI still feels sluggish, just like before.

and yet if I install Chromium alongside it, pages still actually load faster in Firefox than in Chrome. I don't know what Google is doing instead of trying to load the page right away but I don't like it.

Does Notscripts work correctly yet? I might try actually doing regular testing of Chromium again if so.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[binarylarry]

The iPhone and Blackberry were the top two smartphone plans... until the open Android system destroyed them in the market place in record time.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[rfdparker2002]

Thousands of devices that'll never support the HTML5 video tag anyway (many of which don't have a browser even). I'm sorry but the future of web standards shouldn't be shackled to the demands of (what in my opinion is) a protection racket, just so it's using the same codec as a Blu-ray player.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Kosi]

If you want all the features of Chrome without the nasty stuff Google put in, try SRWare Iron.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[supersloshy]

Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

Um... wget/curl? Any download manager + VLC/MPlayer? It's not hard. There's a million different ways to play H.264-encoded content outside of Firefox. Inside, though, I'm sure it's possible to write a plugin that replaces embedded H.264 HTML5 tags with an external player (like Microsoft did).

Regardless of the possible workarounds, this isn't a battle of functionality, this is a battle of rights. Mozilla isn't supporting H.264 even if it's a system codec because it wants to make sure that all Firefox forks and related projects can use the codecs without fear of patent infringement. Then there's also patent licensing and things like that, which are a huge hurdle for open source software in the USA. VLC, for example, is based in France so there's no fear of patent infringement (software patents don't exist over there). Firefox/Mozilla is based in the USA, so anything that they distribute must be legal. Including H.264 would cost Mozilla $5,000,000 per year, content creators would still have to pay license fees (eventually) for H.264-encoded content, and any and all forks/related projects of Firefox would not be able to include H.264 without breaking the law (unless they're based where software patents don't exist).

Mozilla supports WebM/Theora/Vorbis not for technical reasons; it supports them for ideological and economic reasons. I completely agree with their decision and I hope that software patents are abolished in the USA as well someday so we can get H.264 playback... :/

Re:UI is still sluggish

[drinkypoo]

If you want all the features of Chrome without the nasty stuff Google put in, try SRWare Iron.

Iron has all the same features, except that it sends you to some useless add-on market with like 10% of the stuff that's in the real add-on repo. They might turn stuff off by default but it's just an outdated build of Chromium for Windows. And BTW, I run Linux. I could run Iron under Wine but that would be dumb. Your clue was that I said "chromium" repeatedly.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?

H.264-supporting browsers:

• Safari
• IE9 RC

Non-supporting browsers:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Opera
• IE8

Hmm... looks like 4 to your 1.5.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[amn108]

There was some dude here not long ago with a comment on how JavaScript/XML and all that "mostly-interpreted" hallabaluja (which IS a life saver often, I'll admit) doesn't matter with UIs in particular. Wonder where he is now :-)

Then again, since it was exactly JS speed that is improved in FF4, assuming they apply it to their XUL as well (i know they do), it can only mean that the UI should get the speed benefit as well.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Kosi]

Ooops, I missed that. :) And you're right, that they send you to that other place for extensions is not good, the second thing I dislike in Iron so far (the first is that there is no autoupdate function, but as Google chose to do that with their stupid updater service, and not inside the browser like FF, that would require a more extensive coding).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube also serves up WebM, which Fx4 supports, so who gives a shit?

And you just contradicted yourself: Fx4 does support H.264 if you have a plugin that provides that functionality. Your plugin is named "Adobe Flash Player".

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Anonymous Coward]

SRWare Iron is basically a scam. The changes they made have never been privacy issues in the first place. Maybe it's different since then, but here's what it looked like back in version 4

Re:UI is still sluggish

[zixxt]

Thanks for saving me the trouble , SRware is nothing more than Chrom(e)ium with a light editing of build options and source code.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[LordLimecat]

I dont understand this. People want to use Google's product, but dont trust the company (who incidentally has a pretty clear "heres what we do with your data, and how to disable it in chrome). So instead of grabbing the open source Chromium and unticking the "send my data to Google" boxes, you go to a completely unvetted third party who claims "we've removed the nasty bits, and did some unspecified tweaking to make it faster and better!" and download their binaries? Which, I note, have no source code available to actually check?

What makes you think SRWare is trustworthy? Wheres THEIR privacy policy, I note their site doesnt even list one? Has anyone actually audited the thing to make sure its not leaking info to SRWare?

I dont know about you, but Id much rather just untick chrome's "send my info to Google" option boxes than trust some unknown 3rd party with neither history nor published privacy policy.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[LordLimecat]

Having update code inside the browser would lead to the same obnoxiousness that firefox has-- non admin users getting pestered to update, and then unable to actually perform said update (as the browser would be running as a non-admin user).

Having the updater running under an admin account seperate from the browser makes a lot of sense, as the updates actually are applied regularly (again, unlike firefox where out of date browsers are QUITE common).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[maxume]

I use Chrome for this and that and don't worry about it, but it appears that the SRWare privacy policy is simply to not collect any user data.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[bemymonkey]

Engadget, Slashgear, and quite a few other gadget blogs. They only supply it if your user agent is a non-desktop string (iPad/Pod/Phone, Android), of course, but they have it available.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[teh kurisu]

The RC certainly starts up a lot quicker than the latest 3.x release, which was so slow it was actually comical (the other day my boss and I stood and laughed while we waited the ~30 s for Firefox to start up).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Lennie]

Chrome and Opera don't have H.264 either by default. On Windows Microsoft allows you to install something which makes Firefox have H.264 (Windows includes a license for H.264 supposedly, but Microsoft is part of that 'band of brothers' anyway).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[LordLimecat]

I was unable to locate said policy on their site, link?

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Kosi]

Not a privacy policy, but probably he is talking about this: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

Re:UI is still sluggish

[maxume]

That's why I said appears. It would probably be good PR for them to make up a cute presentation on its own page stating as much, but if you combine the statement about using a packet sniffer to monitor the software and the Chrome comparison, it is clear that they are at least advertising that it doesn't collect data.

But if they aren't collecting any data, they don't really need to state what they do with the data they collect.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Kosi]

Obviously such a function needs to be de-/selectable in the options. At least they could implement a "check for updates" button or menu option, eliminating the steps needed to manually download and install a new version, which is a PITA when you look at the speed in which new versions pop out.

And, except for corporate environments with stupid IT management forbidding timely updates and/or lazy admins, why do you think outdated FFs are that common? Let's face the truth, the common home user still works under an admin account, and still clicks "yes" on about every dialog he sees. FF informs of newer versions, so if the user regularly starts FF, it will be up to date in most cases. When I see an outdated FF on a personal machine, it is in almost every case because the user hasn't started it since it had been installed (mostly by someone else like me).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[hairyfeet]

I'm glad I'm not the only one! I've had arguments here with guys saying "Oh they're not ripping off Chrome!" when I said from watching FF lately it smells like cargo cult usability which is EXACTLY what you are describing, where they've ripped off the superficial stuff but not the underlying functionality which I'd argue they simply can't because Gecko simply wasn't built for it.

For example I bet if you were to go over the MozDev blogs before Chrome you wouldn't see squat written about plugin sandboxing, maybe as a long term possibility, but nothing definite, same with JavaScript benchmarks and radical speedups.

But when Chrome came out with those they said "Me too!" only the problem was Gecko can't really do that without a rebuild so you have what I'm experiencing now where using the EXACT same extensions I have in Chrome FF will begin sucking RAM like a drunk sucking MD20/20 and after using a half a dozen tabs for half a day even with trim_on_minimize FF will suck up nearly the entire 1.5Gb of RAM on my nettop while flash runs like crap sandboxed, while Chrome has NO problems on the same machine doing the same tasks.

I'd say the FF devs really need to watch this "me too" Chrome ripping, because if they don't it'll bite them in the ass. If I wanted Chrome there is Chrome,Chromium,Comodo Dragon,SWIron, etc and all of them run better than FF aping Chrome. So instead of trying to match Chrome on every bullet point, why not just be the best FF you can be? Work on making the extensions framework even better (because lets face it, it is the extensions that keep folks on FF) while lowering memory and CPU usage and keeping things tight and unbloated. Quit adding crap to the main browser and leave them as extensions/plugins like your original mission statement to make a low resource fast browser with easy customizing. Let Chrome be Chrome, you be the best FF you can be. Is that really so hard?

Re:UI is still sluggish

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

blip.tv

Re:UI is still sluggish

[DrXym]

There was some dude here not long ago with a comment on how JavaScript/XML and all that "mostly-interpreted" hallabaluja (which IS a life saver often, I'll admit) doesn't matter with UIs in particular. Wonder where he is now :-)

p. It shouldn't and I don't feel it does for Firefox. The XML, JS & CSS all gets parsed on first invocation into XUL.mfl which is for fast loading. It still impacts startup somewhat, but after that it's just another UI that could be natively written for all the difference it makes.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Certainly H.264 has a greater install base right now, but relative to the potential market for web based video, it isn't such a big deal. For example, the mobile phones that support H.264 have mostly arrived in the last 2 years, and the smart phone market is still rapidly expanding.

And despite H.264's current install base, I'd say most web-video is consumed via Flash plugins (whilst accepting that those in turn use H.264 data).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[pugugly]

Actually, I abhor the minimalist chrome 'hide everything useful' interface, and I'm finding this one okay so far - I can see the similarity in style, but it's substantially better version of it.

Pug

Re:UI is still sluggish

[nschubach]

For one, they let me keep the menu bar...

Re:UI is still sluggish

[PaladinAlpha]

You know, what you said would make perfect sense if it were said by someone who managed after all these years to still not know what "Open Source" means. H.264 is a good product, but it's not a free one -- beer-wise or speech-wise. WebM is open source and free in both senses.

You can go get some source code right now if you want to. Tweak the algorithms. Compile it locally. Integrate as a first-class caller. That's open. Not another lock-in attempt with everyone in on it this time.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Risen888]

Sounds like what folks used to say about Real Audio.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[ultranova]

Not for long though, google chrome is also dropping this patent trap.

This raises a question: why do browsers need to support particular codecs? Media players use those installed in the system; why don't browsers?

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Shining Celebi]

For example I bet if you were to go over the MozDev blogs before Chrome you wouldn't see squat written about plugin sandboxing, maybe as a long term possibility, but nothing definite, same with JavaScript benchmarks and radical speedups.

I don't know about plugin sandboxing, but the rest is definitely not true. Mozilla already had nightly (or possibly beta builds) showcasing radical Javascript speedups before Chrome was announced. And that meant a faster UI too, thanks to that being written in Javascript.

That said, Firefox is fast and stable for me while Chrome is very slightly less fast (no difference most of the time) and not stable at all. I also have the opposite problem with memory - if they were cars, Firefox would be a Prius and Chrome would be a Hummer, especially on very large webpages, were Chrome sometimes crashes after using up gigs of memory. But evidently, mileage may vary.

For the most part, I also find the new features pretty useful. And if I don't (like App Tabs) they're not obtrusive at all and I can completely ignore them. So I don't really see the problem, personally.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Giometrix]

For what OS? It doesn't feel sluggish on Windows 7 (at least not on any of my machines).

Re:UI is still sluggish

[zoom-ping]

It's been known for a while that SRWare Iron is a scam.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Per Wigren]

I'm sure that there are even more people with iPhones and Blackberries today than it was before Android came along. Android didn't destroy iPhone and Blackberry. If anything, it explosively expanded the market. It made them smaller in comparision but not in number of sales.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Tubal-Cain]

It supports H.264...but not in an HTML5 video tag, which I'm pretty sure is that he meant when he said there isn't a plugin for it.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[hairyfeet]

Have you tried one of the Chromium based browsers? I found Chrome sluggish on my nettop (1.8GHz Sempron, 1.5Gb of RAM) and didn't like the phone home crap so I tried just about all of them and found Comodo Dragon to be the best IMHO. It has nice security features (such as SSL segregation and the choice of using their secure DNS), works with all the Chrome extensions like Adblock and ForecastFox (yeah I know, but that's what they call it) and if it runs good on my nettop then you KNOW it'll run good on just about anything, as a powerhouse it ain't. And as for as stability goes its been rock solid.

Now while I'm glad you think the new Firefox is the bee's knees I have to support a WILDLY diverse group of machines, from nettops and netbooks to old P4s and new hotness. So to me a good solid experience no matter what the hardware counts, and as someone who remembers the bad old days of FF 2.x I REALLY don't want to go back to having to kill my browser every time it starts sucking up the RAM.

Using this nettop running bog standard WinXP SP3 as a testbed I've found after about a half a day of surfing, never more than 6 tabs open and never more than one video site at a time, FF will begin to seriously suck RAM, even if Trim_on_minimize is on and you close out all the other tabs. It is JUST like what we'd have in 2.x where once a tab took memory it just didn't give it back. I can't be sure but I think their plugin sandbox doesn't give back memory claimed by a plugin, like say a flash vid.

Now compare to the Dragon, where it doesn't matter how long the browser runs a page will take between 14-25Mb of RAM depending on content, period. Close a tab? memory comes back. Now if it is just the "whiz bang" new UI that is doing it then FF needs a way to go "classic mode" but I seriously think they've pushed Gecko farther than it was meant to go. You've basically shoehorned multithreading onto a single threaded app with the sandbox for plugins and I think it is leaking memory.

But whatever the case, if I wanted Chrome I'd run it, and why not just have those new features as recommended extensions or plugins? Wasn't that the point of splitting off the suite? To have a nice light browser that you could customize your way and I could customize it mine? So why the extra bloat? I just think Firefox should concentrate on being the best FF they can be and stop trying to match Google bullet point to bullet point. Because in the end they will simply lose, as Webkit was simply designed more modular than Gecko and you can't keep bolting on the whiz bang without ending up in a bloated memory leaking mess, ala 2.x

Re:UI is still sluggish

[tepples]

Why are they, "too late", when ever indicator, and I mean every indicator, says the exact opposite of what you're saying?

The current generation of appliances plays only MPEG-4 (AVC+AAC in MP4), not WebM (VP8+Vorbis in MKV). Even if an appliance's DSP can be software upgraded to decode VP8, the appliance manufacturer probably won't bother to do so. And you can't make your own upgrade because the appliance manufacturer will decline to digitally sign it. Therefore, VP8 will have to wait for the next generation of appliances. And by 2013, the successor to AVC is expected to already have reached its final draft.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[Kosi]

That's a strange definition of scam you are using. I didn't check very thorough, but I don't see any claims made by SRWare that Iron doesn't fulfill.

OK, a good part of the stuff they did can be configured by the user, but some things, like wiping the client ID, require a little more than simply turning it off in the options. And I see no point where SRWare included something that is not in the user's interest, like Google is doing with Chrome (e. g. the Client ID, which is only serving Google's interest). So, Iron is a good choice for privacy concerned people who would like to have a browser that works out of the box without telling some company this and that about what you do.

Besides, when I last checked, Chrome (Win) installed itself unasked(!) in the User's AppData folder, which is a place for applications' data, not the applications itself. And the didn't provide a real installer, only some starter program which downloaded the rest then. Oh, and removing the updater service was a good idea, too, although they should have included a "check for and install updates" button somewhere.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[DaVince21]

I find it looks more like Opera, what with the menu at the top left and all that.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[DaVince21]

Oh, and Google planned to remove H.264 from Chrome some months ago, though it still seems to be working anyway.

Re:UI is still sluggish

[DaVince21]

A year old laptop is plenty already to make it run sluggish here and there. Mileage may vary depending on your system. For me, it mostly works fast except for the add-on manager.

FF 4 is nice so far

[click2005]

I have to say that so far I'm very impressed. Once I'd moved the tabs and buttons back to where I like them it was great. Memory usage is much better and the speed compared to 3.x is incredible. Sync is nice as you can run your own server.

I prefer the old buttons and liked having a status bar but i'm sure somebody will create add-ons to fix that.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I prefer the old buttons and liked having a status bar but i'm sure somebody will create add-ons to fix that.

Status-4-Evar

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[click2005]

Much better. Thank you.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[devent]

the speed compared to 3.x is incredible

I tried FF4 and the sites are loading as fast as in FF3. What have you done so that you can browse the web faster?

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[ppz003]

In the last beta, they put the same text you would get hovering over a link in a popup that appears in the same position as the old status bar. Aside from some addons that resided in the status bar (now called addon bar), I've been happy with the recent change. Trying to put that text in the location bar just didn't work, and they fixed it.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[click2005]

Some sites I visit often took a few seconds to create menus and are almost instant now. Its probably more to do with JavaScript speed though.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[marcello_dl]

FF4 on linux, using the .mozilla folder setting directly from iceweasel 3.5 recognized history, cookies, flash, noscript and video downloadhelper extensions, shows the statusbar at the right place and keeps the custom UI font. The only thing I'm waiting for is... er... the red cats theme.

I hope the UI changes made on windows will be easily reversible on all platforms.

And it hasn't crashed by browsing slashdot which is likely a good test...

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[bemymonkey]

Memory usage is much better and the speed compared to 3.x is incredible.

Oh hell yes. It's become downright usable... average memory usage has dropped from 800MB to 450MB... I'm ecstatic. :)

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[hedwards]

My Linux install doesn't yet have FF 4.0 on it because I can't be bothered to install it, but the 3.6 version is really, really slow no matter where I go compared with 4.0 on my Windows install. I suppose it could be due to the different OSes, but I doubt that very much. That's FF3.6 with basically no add ins installed and 4.0 with noscript, ghostery and a couple other ones.

Not sure what might be up with yours if you're not seeing a difference.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[devent]

The first post was a joke because I couldn't care less if some stupid JavaScript runs 500ms faster or not. Normally I deactivated all JS anyway and I'm in the web to read text not to play some JS games. So since the new FF4 won't download anything faster I'm always very uninterested with the penis comparisons of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft.

Not sure what might be up with yours if you're not seeing a difference.

Maybe I don't have a broken computer? I have been running FF3 on Fedora 14 on a Asus Netbook with Intel card and Atom CPU, a Notebook from Lenovo with Intel and 4 core (or 2 core and hyper threading) and my old Lenovo notebook with a Nvidia and Intel Core Duo with 2.6GHz (the current one). Open tabs are 10 to 20, Slashdot, Youtube, and other sites.

Re:FF 4 is nice so far

[Homburg]

Normally I deactivated all JS anyway

Not if you're using Firefox, you didn't - Firefox is written in Javascript, so speeding up the Javascript engine should speed up Firefox itself, as well as JS on webpages.

Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

if you want all you extensions to work. Half of them will be disabled in the new version because their authors haven't had time to release a version that this particular version of FF4 will accept. I suggest waiting until FF4 becomes mainstream if you want the transition to be seamless.

If you don't care that much about extensions however, go right ahead: FF4 is *great*: it's quick and less memory hungry, if nothing else. I've been loving it since it came out.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Skarecrow77]

Adblock has worked for at least the past 3 betas, and that's the one I care about.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[RobbieThe1st]

Power users -really- use FF -without- disabling compatibility checking? Amazing.
I've been using FF4 nightlies with "incompatible" add-ons for over a year, now... Most work fine, occasionally something wont, but that's usually fixed by getting a beta from the addon author's site.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Kosi]

I switched when the beta 10 was released. Most of my extensions worked right away, especially the vital ones (Adblock Plus, NoScript). For some, like Firebug or FEBE, I had to switch to the dev/beta version. The only thing I really missed was Extended Statusbar, but it just took some time. And I found a better cookie extension (Cookie Monster), because I didn't want to wait for an update for my old one (Cookie Culler).

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[AndrewNeo]

This is a really weird thing, to me. It happens *every* major version of Firefox release, too, and usually results in some addons being abandoned and replaced by one that supports the new version. I'm an addon developer and my extension has had support since the betas were available to set as a version in addons.mozilla.org. There's been plenty of time, and I doubt they've been breaking addons *that* often.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Samantha Wright]

Unless that addon is vimperator.

Damn you, vimperator.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[BSG_72]

Check out Pentadactyl a fork of vimperator by several of the developers. I currently am using it on 4.0RC1. Additionally, the nightly builds of vimperator have been working reasonably well on the 4.0 betas; I assume they would work well on the RC, too, but I haven't tried yet.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[bemymonkey]

Tab Mix Plus works, NoScript works, ABP works, Grab and Drag works, Fox to Phone works... all without turning off compatibility checks. I'd say they're doing pretty well...

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[jorgevillalobos]

The long beta cycle for Firefox 4 has paid off in this regard, and the majority of add-ons are already compatible. Pretty much every popular add-on already works well in Firefox 4.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Lennie]

Jetpack (Mozilla's new development system for addons) solves these problems. It gives addon developers a stable API.

Users don't need to restart when installing addons either.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Verteiron]

Interestingly, I thought I had all compatibility checks disabled, but it still disabled Tree-style Tabs as "incompatible" when I upgraded from beta 12 to the RC.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[tepples]

I tried Fx4, and both ChatZilla and Perspectives ended up listed as incompatible. I switched back to 3.6.

Re:Now is the time *not* to try Firefox 4

[Joren]

Get the Addon Compatibility Reporter. Mozilla recommends it to get around this very problem... I found out about it via their FAQ page. This disables checking for compatibility so you can test the extensions and report to their devs that they are still working (or not).

Ditto Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1

[C_amiga_fan]

RC is scheduled for later this month.
(But of course there won't be a / vertisement for it.) SeaMonkey 2.1 final will be based on Gecko 2.0.1

Re:Ditto Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

RC is scheduled for later this month.
(But of course there won't be a / vertisement for it.)

Scandalous! Maybe Mozilla should call for the European Union to investigate this evil monopolistic conspiracy between Slashdot and whatever shadowy company is behind the Firefox browser.

Re:Ditto Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.1

[Spad]

It's like having Firefox but without all the shitty UI changes!

Performance Much Better

[mangusman]

There's no question that the performance has increased and pages are rendered much quicker, but it does come at a cost. Memory consumption and memory leaks are STILL a problem. Having said that, Chrome's memory usage isn't much better, and neither is IEs.

Re:Performance Much Better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Chrome uses more memory than Firefox with both just one tab and several tabs.

Re:Performance Much Better

[DrXym]

Actually, Chrome uses more memory than Firefox with both just one tab and several tabs.

How do you quantify that it "uses" more. Most browsers look at how much memory you have and then reserve a chunk of it to optimize their performance. e.g. longer session history, uncompressed image bitmaps, memory cache, cached JS code, larger heap for JS etc. Stuff that saves time if a user reloads a page or whatever. Just because a browser appears to use more memory doesn't mean it is hurting the system. Most browsers have special memory pressure monitors which will flush out this stuff and adjust downwards if real memory gets tight.

Re:Performance Much Better

[hedwards]

Firefox tends to top out at about 250mb of RAM typically, lately it's gone above that, but if you leave it sit for a few days or keep it open constantly it tends not to go much above that. There was a comparison a while back between the major browsers and Firefox beat the crap out of the other ones. Unfortunately, that was a while back and so it's not particularly informative anymore, but that was relatively recently, think 3.x series.

Most of the time when people claim that Firefox is leaking memory it's not the browser it's one of their addons or their doing something really strange. I'm sure there are cases where individuals do wind up with it eating up a lot of memory, but it's something they're generally aware of. That's one of the things they're keeping an eye on with those studies.

Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage I think this is the comparison I saw, the situation is likely to have changed since then.

FF4 vs. Chrome... Use both

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using FF4 since about beta 7. I really hope they got the stability issues fixed, especially with Tab Candy, which has been quite glitchy for me during the betas.

Chrome still *feels* snappier, but the JavaScript tests I performed showed them about equal for the most part.

Chrome's WebGL is faster, but glitchier (re-draw issues with non-webgl components on the screen?).

Either way, it's an awesome product. I use FF4 and Chrome daily, so it's not like I am "choosing" one or the other. Both are stellar products.

And ultimately, I feel more comfortable with FF4, because it's not produced by an advertising company.

Feature Bloat

[Sonny Yatsen]

I've been using FF4 since one of the earlier betas (I think beta 4?) and so I've seen the new features as it comes in. Is it me or does a lot of the new features, especially the UI features seem completely unnecessary? I've only used app-tabs maybe once and Panorama twice just to see what they do, and after that, I completely disregarded them. I haven't used Sync at all. Is this experience common with other Firefox power users? Or am I just being a bit of a Luddite in not using them?

Re:Feature Bloat

[musikit]

welcome to the world of software development. lots of features only a small subset of users use. i dont follow firefox but i thoughts thats why they were trying to move everything to extensions.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Hatta]

For that matter, Firefox 2.x was just about as feature complete as you'd want a browser to be. All they really needed to do was fix the memory issues and keep the rendering engine up to date, but I guess we can't have nice things.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Sonny Yatsen]

Firefox suffers from its constant desire to meet or beat Chrome and the gajillion UI features Google throws into the browser every other day. It's too bad, really, because it's gone way off-mission. I'll still use it over Chrome, any day (because I don't trust a company that makes its money by tracking my web movements and my web browsing habits to keep its mitts off of my web movements and browsing habits), but I don't recommend Firefox as enthusiastically as I used to back in the day.

Re:Feature Bloat

[supersloshy]

To be fair, there are a lot of things that could be considered "feature bloat" in a browser. The download manager, bookmarks, heck, even tabs could be bloat depending on how you look at it. Tab Groups was included because Firefox knows that it has a large share of power users as well as normal users. For those people with hundreds of tabs, Tab Groups are a godsend. For those who rarely go over 5, simply don't use it. While you might say that this is better as an add-on than a default feature (and to a point I agree with you), the reason they included it is so that Add-ons can integrate themselves with the feature. Providing information at a glance, adding their own buttons to it, and things like that. In fact, if you get the Read It Later extension and open Tab Groups, you'll see a place where you can simply drag-and-drop websites so they'll be added to a "read it later" list. I for one think that's a very useful feature; whether or not you do is completely relative ;)

Re:Feature Bloat

[drinkypoo]

Panorama might be useful if you have 23237234 tabs open, otherwise yes, it's just a waste of time and space that belongs in an extension rather than bloating Firefox. App-tabs are dumb because websites aren't designed like that, when you open another site from that site the metaphor breaks. It's the reason why Jolicloud Linux is dumb. (Including netbook fixes is good; the HTML5 launcher is 'tarded.) I don't use Sync at all and before I didn't use an extension which handles Sync.

On the other hand, I am running Firefox 4 because it provides acceleration even on Linux so long as you have nVidia, which I do. It seems both Intel and ATI's path to OpenGL is total shit.

Re:Feature Bloat

[DrXym]

I've been using FF4 since one of the earlier betas (I think beta 4?) and so I've seen the new features as it comes in. Is it me or does a lot of the new features, especially the UI features seem completely unnecessary? I've only used app-tabs maybe once and Panorama twice just to see what they do, and after that, I completely disregarded them. I haven't used Sync at all. Is this experience common with other Firefox power users? Or am I just being a bit of a Luddite in not using them?

Panorama is utterly useless in its current form and (a worse sin) is the source of many of the bugs delaying FF4.0. It should have gotten the chop. Perhaps if groups were remembered or something it might have some purpose. Perhaps if the "Group your tabs" was some kind of funky springloaded popup making it natural and easy to flip between groups or arrange them. But expecting people to arrange groups of tabs and see that all disappear when the browser closes is just a waste of time.

App tabs are useful for saving space, but again they're not persistent. Why can't I pin an app tab to my browser and have it there when I next open it? Why does clicking the Home button not take me back to the first url the app tab is associated with? Why can't I edit a bookmark and say it's an "application" url, so that opening it in a new tab does so as an App tab. Again, it needs some work.

Despite these issues FF4.0 overall is a huge improvement. The layout is hugely more efficient on small displays (e.g. netbooks) and the UI feels a lot more responsive. Beta issues such as the incredible disappearing status bar have been adequately resolved. Some of the HTML5 demos are awesome. I'd have no hesitation recommending it.

Re:Feature Bloat

[nschubach]

I happen to like app tabs. The name sucks, but the functionality of putting commonly used tabs off to the side with only their icon cleans up some space on the tab bar. It's best if you don't think of it as an app tab, but a "stored" tab.

Re:Feature Bloat

[CyberDragon777]

I realy don't like the sync feature since they're spying on what you think is interesting and have bookmarked.

This is Mozilla, not Google.

Synced data is encrypted and you can use your own server if you want.

Re:Feature Bloat

[stoanhart]

As soon as I started using FF4 at the last beta (12), I started using all of those features. I keep GMail and Google Calendar in app-tabs, I love sync because I have Firefox instances in many VMs and on many machines, and the Panorama tool (which I thought would be gimmicky before I actually tried it) turns out to be very useful. I am happy with such "Feature Bloat" - what the hell to I have 4 gigs of RAM for anyways?

Re:Feature Bloat

[drinkypoo]

I'm willing to accept that some people find it useful but I'm not willing to accept that it belongs in the core. The functionality for tabs is in the core; App Tabs should be an Add-On, like say All-In-One-Sidebar (one of my very favorite add-ons) or Scrapbook+ (which is extra-slow to bring up its menu but still works in FF4 via nightly tester tools.) I love Firefox and load tons of extensions, but not within orders of magnitude as many as I don't load. App Tabs is just one more thing I wouldn't load.

Re:Feature Bloat

[egoots]

Firefox suffers from its constant desire to meet or beat Chrome and the gajillion UI features Google throws into the browser every other day. .

The perception is that if they don't keep up, they will lose market share. Maybe you or I don't want them, but all the people who make noise and write reviews and articles compare all these things and pan them if Feature X is not there.

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't (add features) these days

Re:Feature Bloat

[Lennie]

I don't mind if developers add features as long as the application isn't slow or becomes slower. In this case Firefox was sometimes slow in previous versions this version uses less memory, less CPU and is more responsive. Also it adds a lot of new features and support for a lot of new HTML-/CSS-/other specs.

I wouldn't mind if it's like that all the time. :-)

Re:Feature Bloat

[hedwards]

That memory leak was fixed a long time ago. And by that I mean since at least Firefox 3.5. I realize that trolls seem to think otherwise, but as of Firefox 3.5 it was beating the crap out of chrome and most of the other browsers in terms of memory allocation. Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage As far as the rendering engine goes, it's stable, they're working on it and it's getting better but they have to worry a lot more than the Google folks do about pissing off a large user base by making substantial changes to the rendering engine every release. And yes, that makes a difference. I like that Firefox doesn't typically break my web experience when I update.

Re:Feature Bloat

[hedwards]

I actually like Panorama. I don't typically use it, but when I'm doing research online, I can send items that I think I'm going to want to bookmark to their own tab group and then just bookmark all those pages in that tab group while excluding the ones that aren't related.

The feature is new enough, that I don't think most of us have really come up with how to use it maximally. I just wish that they would add a default name to each new tab group so that I didn't have to immediately go in and give it a name. Basically allow me to send a lot of tabs over there to the same group without having to name it just to do that.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Hatta]

That memory leak was fixed a long time ago. And by that I mean since at least Firefox 3.5.

Yeah I know. I was talking about Firefox 2.x. Reading comprehension, learn it.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Risen888]

Sync's fantastic. I'm using the addon on 3.x, and it has been the answer to my prayers. (Once I disabled history sharing on my home desktop, ahem.) Otherwise I dunno, I'm not on the 4 branch.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Derek Pomery]

Depends on your fglrx version apparently.
And for intel, your mesa version.
I was getting crashes in the webgl test suite with my intel card until I updated the machine to Natty Narwhale.
Mesa in that version is apparently fixed.

My fglrx works fine in Maverick with the test suite. Has never crashed.
Use the environment variable MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1

You can add it to /etc/profiles.d or whatever your distro equivalent is if your results are good.

https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html
Basically if you can run through this without crashes (including crashing on closing the tab or exiting the browser) you're probably fine.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Shining Celebi]

The default Firefox home page asks me if I want to restore my previous session every time I open it, which brings back all my app tabs and tab groups.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Shining Celebi]

Panorama might be useful if you have 23237234 tabs open, otherwise yes, it's just a waste of time and space that belongs in an extension rather than bloating Firefox.

Exactly how is it bloating Firefox? Is it a huge UI distraction? No, I don't think so, it's buried in a submenu. Does the code for Panorama slow down Firefox in any meaningful way when it is not being used? I don't think so. Is the code adding megabytes to the executable? Somehow I doubt it.

I think by bloat you mean "I don't use it so nobody else wants it so it's bloat! Get off my lawn!" On the other hand, I've seen tons of Slashdot posters talking about having hundreds of tabs open at a time. I suspect they probably find it useful. I very rarely use it - usually I make a "work" group and a "play" group - but its existence doesn't bother me. It's not in my way. Some people find it useful and would rage on Slashdot if it was removed/Firefox had no jillion-tab management. You are not the world's only use case for software.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Jane Q. Public]

"Synced data is encrypted and you can use your own server if you want."

Do you have a citation for that? I was wondering the same thing but have not found an answer anywhere.

Re:Feature Bloat

[DrXym]

It may do, but that means disabling privacy settings. I'm sure Firefox could consider app tabs to be something to always open while respecting a user's privacy settings and not remembering what they did the last session.

Re:Feature Bloat

[Shining Celebi]

I'm not sure I get what you're saying. If you want Firefox to respect your privacy settings and not remember what you did last session, then why would you want it to come up with App Tabs that have your Facebook and Gmail loaded up? From a usability perspective, this makes sense to me - treat App Tabs as permanent and regular tabs as transient - but from a privacy perspective, what's the difference? Your tabs are your tabs and App Tabs are more likely to contain personal/private information.

Re:Feature Bloat

[multipartmixed]

Sync is pretty cool, although I thought it was fine as an add-on.

It's particularly useful when syncing your tabs to a mobile device; you can basically pick up your browsing session "on the go".

Re:Feature Bloat

[supersloshy]

If I had asked my customers what they'd wanted, they would have said a faster horse

- Henry Ford (supposedly) (paraphrased)

Re:Feature Bloat

[CyberDragon777]

https://services.mozilla.com/privacy-policy/

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Crypto

Re:Feature Bloat

[Jane Q. Public]

Syncing is a nice feature but I did not trust those other syncing tools with my data. This is cool. Just the ticket.

Re:Feature Bloat

[DMUTPeregrine]

Firefox has an awesome addons framework. Why not ship a very lightweight browser and add functionality with installed-by-default addons? Put them in a separate first-party addons window, but let people disable them at will. You can add all the features you want, and people who want a faster browser can turn them off.

Re:Feature Bloat

[DrXym]

All I expect it to do is what happens with the taskbar in Windows 7 or the dock in OS X. You can launch any app you like and it will appear in the task bar / dock. If you wish to keep the icon in the task bar you pin it. Then if you logout and log back in the OS the pinned icons remain where you put them. That's the way I expect app tabs to work in a browser. An app tab is a glorified shortcut that a user has chosen to pin to their tabbar and wants to be there when they restart the app. The user may or may not want to open the other tabs depending on their privacy settings. In my case I don't want normal tabs to reopen and my privacy settings reflect that.

Tabs!

[bulletman]

Please let new tabs open alongside the current tab! With a bunch of tabs, it makes navigation between the parent and child tab so much easier.

Re:Tabs!

[Takichi]

I'm a little confused about placing tabs at the top of window above the address bar. They say it gives the tabs top visual priority, but it seems the opposite to me. If you are browsing webpages amongst different tabs, then surely placing the tabs at the bottom is better since that reduces the distance between the tabs and the content on the page. Plus, tabs at the bottom reduces visual interference from a largely irrelevant address bar. I'm hoping this will be customisable, but putting it at the top of the page as a major feature seems daft.

Re:Tabs!

[TaoPhoenix]

Investigate View-Toolbars-Uncheck Tabs on top.

Re:Tabs!

[maxume]

Did they change it again? In 3.x, browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent is true by default.

Re:Tabs!

[Samantha Wright]

Try pressing Ctrl+Shift+E.

Re:Tabs!

[compro01]

Go grab Tab Mix Plus. It adds that feature, among others.

Re:Tabs!

[nschubach]

You want me to open my adblock settings?

Re:Tabs!

[jlebar]

Please let new tabs open alongside the current tab! With a bunch of tabs, it makes navigation between the parent and child tab so much easier.

Try it. It does this!

Re:Tabs!

[Samantha Wright]

Alack alas. It's the Panorama hotkey in a stock build of FF 4.

Re:Tabs!

[Risen888]

Have a look at Tree Style Tabs. I can't live without it anymore. TST and Stylish are really the main things keeping me on Firefox these days.

Re:Tabs!

[error_logic]

Set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to true, or find whatever add-on is changing the behavior. That should fix it.

Yup

[Greyfox]

Work has a Hudson server set up for automated tests. It's godawful slow with firefox 3, so I gave it a try with Chrome. Chrome is just ridiculously faster with it. It's usable with Firefox 4, but there are still places where the browser just freezes up for a second or two. So far I'm just using chrome for that Hudson server, but it wouldn't take much for Chrome to unseat Firefox as my default browser, and I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember.

Re:Old news is old

[mseidl]

I'm still using lynx you insensitive clod!

It's been a while...

[Donniedarkness]

It's been a while since I've used Firefox (I believe I stopped using it just as version 3 was either being finish or just released-- switched to Opera and then Opera/Chrome).

I've gotta say, the RC isn't bad. I hate that they've completely gone the Chrome route with the UI, though (although Opera did about the same thing). If some of my plugins (Logmein in particular) worked on it, I'd probably even keep using it (as it is, Logmein only works well with Internet Explorer and stable builds of FF).

Re:Old news is old

[supersloshy]

RC1 has been out for a week now

Correction: the first test build of RC1 has been out for a week now. They had to test it and make sure it was good enough for the official RC release, which is a huge deal considering the time and effort put into this release (3.6 was released in January 2010).

Will they just release this thing already?

[QCompson]

It's probably due to the over-saturated coverage on slashdot, but I feel like FF4 has almost been released for the past year now.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[jfengel]

Yeah, my first thought was "1? I thought they were up to 10."

Then, oh, right, we've moved from beta to RC. For pete's sake, I'm going to wait for the actual release because the existing browser works well enough and I don't want to be a bug-tester. Do I have to hear about each and every point-point-point release?

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[hedwards]

To be fair, I feel that way as well, probably because I haven't had any stability problems worth noting with the betas.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[Shining Celebi]

This quite possibly is the final release. When Mozilla puts out a release candidate, if no major problems are found, it becomes the release version without any changes.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[jfengel]

If you install the Release Candidate, does it automatically update itself to be the real thing when it comes out? Or to the next RC?

If not, it seems like you'll be on the hook for yet another install and upgrade. I know that there will be plenty of people who need to get on that, so that they can be ready with products, but as a browser user rather than developer it seems like this is the sort of thing that should be in a specialized forum rather than the front page every few days.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[Shining Celebi]

The release candidate is the real thing, assuming no showstopping bugs are found. That's what they mean by "release candidate": it's a candidate for the final release. The link titled "Firefox 4 RC1" on the Mozilla website gets changed to "Firefox 4" - that's the only thing that changes. But yes, if there is another release candidate, it will automatically update to the newer one. Just as the betas auto-updated to new betas and now the release candidate.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Actually, the "about" box also removes the "RCx" bit.

Re:Will they just release this thing already?

[Shining Celebi]

The About box doesn't have RC in it. It just has Firefox 4.0. The last RC (quite possibly this one) is literally the final release. Nothing is changed, not even the build id or the About box.

Re:Have they fixed the fonts looking blurry?

[kevinmenzel]

I'm actually curious as to what you mean by the fonts looking blurry? They look the same to me as in any other application...

It is still only a RC

[Jrvarsity]

For bragging about the speed of the browser so much, I did a few loads with Firefox 3.6 and 4RC1 and my home page opened quite a bit faster with version 3.6, in fact almost twice as fast! Although I must say, I do like the new look, very similar to Chrome (like many have stated).
 
I think I'll hold out for the actual release of 4.

Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[Dystopian Rebel]

The sync plug-in for FF 3.6* makes a mess of my bookmarks. I use several computers at home and at work. Screwing up my data is NOT an option.

Can anyone report whether the bookmark sync is robust in the 4 RC? I like the idea of the feature, but Xmarks does it better.

Re:Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[greeze]

No, it's crap. I love Firefox 4, but bookmark sync is pretty friggin' awful. I've lost entire folders full of bookmarks, which wouldn't be a problem if there was a way to roll back to previous versions. There isn't. Once they're gone, they're gone. Luckily I still had my Foxmarks account and was able to bring back most of what I'd lost. Until there's a way to view your sync'd data in a secure online account, and to roll back to previous versions, I suggest you stay far far away from Firefox Sync if you value your data.

Re:Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[silanea]

By now I am completely happy with it. Running nightlies and playing with Labs projects for the past few years I got burned quite a few times when the developers changed vital parts of the sync protocol or the way encryption is handled, but since the last big change a while ago when they stabilised the feature for the last betas I did not experience any issues. Syncing between four installations on two dual-boot machines (each Windows and Ubuntu) works like a charm.

Re:Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[Risen888]

I have been quite pleased with it, but I keep all my bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar. The first time I synced my home desktop with my work machine it made a little mess of the ordering, but I put everything back in place and it's been fine ever since.

Re:Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[MindCrusher]

I am using the sync feature since it was Wave 0.3 and I had no issue with it ever. Previously I used the Google sync plugin that was discontinued. Sync worked flawlessly for me on two Xp desktop and an Ubuntu notebook. I would obviously prefer some kind of version support, but I settle for what I can get.

Re:Does bookmark sync *really* work?

[greeze]

The lack of versioning is the real problem with it, though. It was a fluke that I lost some of my bookmarks, but it happened. In my case, it wasn't user error. It was a bug. But imagine if it was a user error and I accidentally deleted a bookmark or bookmarks. With no versioning in there, there's absolutely no way to get them back.

Sync works great until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, there's no recourse. It's great that it's working for you, but anyone would be wise to have a backup plan in place if they're going to use this.

Upgrading Concerns

[ozone702]

Does anyone know if Firefox will support upgrading from the previous version, including all add ons, extensions, plug ins, etc. that are available in the new version?

Re:Upgrading Concerns

[s7uar7]

I upgraded from 3.6 to b12 and it upgraded extensions that needed to be and disabled extensions and plugins that weren't compatible.

If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chrome

[psm321]

I'd use Chrome.

I just don't understand H.264 cheerleaders

[Anonymous Coward]

What stake do they have in this? It's not like they're going to be left out in the cold if WebM succeeds. After all, the whole point of WebM is to provide a truly open standard that everybody can use, whether commercial or not. So can somebody pinpoint exactly what the H.264 cheerleaders are fighting for? My best guess is that they simply don't like change, same as anybody else -- only they get downright nasty about it for some reason. If you notice, these are the same people that aree vehemently opposed to Theora, as if their lives depended on it. Perhaps some of them are paid shills, but surely that doesn't include all of them.

Again, what in the world are they fighting for?

Closer to feature freeze?

[gumpish]

Mozilla has now released Firefox 4 RC1. For most beta participants the update should be automatic, but for those holding out until it gets closer to feature freeze

lolwtfbbq?

Software isn't fucking BETA until it's feature complete.

Mozilla is adding features to release candidates??

Boy, that sure sounds like some real "innovation" right there...

Re:If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chr

[supersloshy]

You can move tabs back on the bottom, restore the bookmarks bar, and change the Firefox button back to the menu bar. You can restore the statusbar with Status 4 Evar, and you can move and add any buttons you want with a simple right-click. All of these are very trivial to do, and if you don't like customizing your browser there's always Seamonkey, which is pretty much just Firefox without the shiny-ness and a more classic UI.

the duke

[skywatcher2501]

Kinda reminds me of DukeNukemForever, with "10 years" instead of "year".

Re:If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chr

[psm321]

Wait, the status bar is seriously gone from FF4? (I hadn't investigated or used it yet) How do they expect people to avoid phishing/suspect links if there's no simple way to tell where a link leads? Or is there a different place in the UI for it now?

Re:Old news is old

[quicks0rt]

Personally, I'm waiting until RC 14 before trying out.

Status-4-Evar chews up CPU time

[Burz]

I tried it. It sucked.

IMO Mozilla made a mistake in removing the status bar. Link and other information can now be spoofed by malicious web pages because the user will expect that info to appear within the page rendering area.

Re:Status-4-Evar chews up CPU time

[Homburg]

Actually, this complaint only exists with the post-b12 UI, because now the URL preview shows up within the page content area, and can be spoofed. Previously, the URL was in the location bar, and so couldn't be spoofed (although there was a different problem with this, in that there wasn't always enough space to show the whole URL).

I'm not convinced this is a real problem, though; I'm struggling to see what harm a malicious page could actually do tricking you into thinking that a link goes to somewhere other than it really does.

Still corrupts places.sqlite

[kopo]

RC1 still managed to corrupt places.sqlite (the History/Bookmarks database) when I tried to upgrade from Firefox 3.6, just like one of the last 4.0 betas. I had to install a portable edition of FF 3.6, open a backup of my profile with it, and set up Sync in both installations before I could use my existing browser history in the new installation.

Oh, and it now takes about 2 seconds to switch between tabs on a 3-year-old PC.

Re:If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chr

[neminem]

Which is better than when it was missing entirely (it was displayed in a halfassed fashion in the url bar), but still pretty bad. It clips *less*, but it still clips, plus it's always black text, regardless of whether, say, you're viewing a page with a black background.

Every beta release, I turn off Status-4-Evar, determine that FF is unusable without it, and turn it back on. It's sort of sad, but whatever, I can live with having to run one tiny addon to make the browser usable. I've been mostly happy with it except for that.

Re:Have they fixed the fonts looking blurry?

[kevinmenzel]

I'm using Windows 7 and I don't see it... that's why I was wondering... everything looks exactly the same as other applications on Windows 7...