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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."
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.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
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
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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.
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.
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.
Actually, Chrome uses more memory than Firefox with both just one tab and several tabs.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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... :/
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
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 ;)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
I'd use Chrome.
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.
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.
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.
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.