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Firefox 4 Released!
A great number of readers have written in to tell us that Mozilla has officially announced the final, official, Firefox 4.0. Congrats to all the developers who have code in the build. If you want some neat eye candy, you can watch a sweet visualization showing where the downloaders are.
I just downloaded and installed FF4, and unlike what I had expected from the new version, FF4 is actually noticeably slower on most websites, including Slashdot :-/
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
I hope Mozilla makes the next version as secure as IE9
What a horrible thing to say
Sadly, delicious has become indispensible to my online life and their add-on is only compatible with Firefox 3.0 - 4.0b3pre
I guess the latest UI changes in the later 4betas threw them for a loop. If anyone knows the status of that add-on
maybe give an update. Is there still a team working on it, given the shake-up a while back?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
That I will agree with you. The last update from 3.xx broke stuff that was not broken.
End of story.
RC1 had an issue with Menu Display. Seemed to be constrained to the application being open on the secondary monitor.
Release has the same bug, toned down a bit. At least now I can see the menu a bit before it vanishes.... But it's still an annoying bug.
Which will take them 6 months to fix as they concentrate on pleasing the Oooh shiny! crowd with ever more useless bells and whistles.
Cynic? Moi?
You support my intranet worse than Firefox 3! Good work!
The visualization at http://glow.mozilla.org/ is really nice, and I like the fact that there are over 120 downloads every second!
By the way, my firefox updated automatically, does anybody know if it counted as a download?
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Have they caught up yet? A few weeks ago half my extensions didn't work so I reverted.
Also, have they dropped the pretence of being a Foundation yet?
Back then I remember hearing about this Phoenix web browser referred to as Mozilla Lite that was just a few MB and I loved it. Now I have watched as Firefox has grown, but the bloat has as well. Well at least 15 MB is still nothing these days.
Blew up my video driver when I hit a mostly-text site. Lucky for me Windows 7 restarts it gracefully, but while the screen was black I was Waiting for BSOD.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The interface is somewhat streamlined. It is noticeably faster. The support for open standards is better and that's great. They certainly worked hard to ensure they had a solid product--a long time in coming. But, I use Linux most of the time. I'd like to have the features supported in other OSes available to me in my primary OS. Any ideas as to when/if they will have full support for 3d acceleration? I would also like the interface to be identical. I know the Google Chrome guys complained about making their product identical to the Windows version. They ultimately succeeded. I can only wonder when they will for the Linux community.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
it's pretty neat but I can't get it to run Flash on Ubuntu 64-bit :( damn Adobe
"Start Private Browsing" is the second menu option. Guess they know their audience :)
I didn't know people still fed the trolls.
Privacy and avoiding data miner look like pretty good reasons for me.
Does it still have the AwfulBar?
Not interested.
They're also the only browser with Chrome to fight bad the big guys and doesn't support the evil H.264 - someones have to fight for our rights!
Chrome still supports H.264 as of current versions. Youtube still uses H.264. The Youtube App for Android and iOS still supports H.264 streaming. Google Video still supports H.264. So what rights are they fighting? All I see is Google using VP8 to get all sorts of deals with entertainment companies and hardware manufacturers to make themselves more money.
Which will take them 6 months to fix as they concentrate on pleasing the Oooh shiny! crowd with ever more useless bells and whistles.
Cynic? Moi?
Yup, as everyone knows, new = insecure and old = secure. That's why I stick with good ol' IE 6: It's been out so long, I know all the holes have been patched.
Check the timestamp of the newspost and the timestamp of the comment. It's another of Microsoft's poorly-planned astroturfing squad, with a paragraph of text including thinly-veiled praise of their Redmond masters ready to roll the very minute the newspost was made.
No, not "a few minutes afterward", the amount of time it would take to actually type all that. And not "a one-line response", the amount of text you'd expect to get out between noticing the post and responding. Numerous sentences of text, the same minute of the post. All this BEFORE the usual tool-assisted first post crowd comes in. It's a shill.
I've heard many times before that Microsoft itself is largely cloistered from the rest of the world, engineers, marketeers, and management alike. They actually DO think this is the best way to spread the gospel of Microsoft, and they actually DO think nobody will notice it.
IAAMMA[1]: Downloads go through a central bouncer that issues http-redirects to mirrors. The stats come from the bouncer.
1: I Am A Mozilla Mirror Admin :)
Is it less buggy? Please, somebody tell me that some of the random crashing, failed renderings, and memory leaks are fixed. While Adblock is great, it's not going to keep me from reverting my whole company back to IE forever...
I don't respond to AC's.
Have they dumped the awesome bar yet? It makes my browsing more difficult nearly every day.
What are they going to do next? Replace the menubar with a start button? Oh, wait...
Right click on the blank gray space next to the tabs and uncheck the "Tabs on Top" property. That will put the tabs back below the location bar, where they belong.
Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
According to the download page, the new version includes "even more awesomeness". No word on whether or not the level of suck has decreased.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The only indispensable extension that I use NoScript, XMark have been 4.x compatible already. The one other must have extension is All-In-One Mouse Gesture have a hackable version that I can live with for now. Two of my infrequently use extension haven't been updated yet, but they don't have too much development activities, and I'm not too worry.
Went to Chrome... Not looking back without a good reason...
Print Preview
No, the tin foil hat he's wearing probably blocked that information out.
This tone of this article summary versus the tone of the summary when IE9 was released.
Mention of new features? Reviews? None of that. Apparently unnecessary - only congratulations are in order.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Pleased so far. All my dozen add-ons worked, although eBay's sidebar update has failed to download an icon, which I would have removed anyway.
:)
Was shocked to see the tab positions. Lucky "Hide Caption T. Plus" had an option to put them back where they belong. Dunno why they've moved the home button either - all buttons belong together devs!
Now to try some of this newfangled HTML5 I've been reading about, heh.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
On every benchmark test I took online (HTML5 and javascript) Chrome 11 far, far outperformed Firefox 4, which in turn is comparable to IE9. I only have an integrated graphics chipset so that might have something to do with it.
someones have to fight for our rights!
??? I fend for myself, and it is remarkably easy. I contribute to software development only if it is FLOSS, and I use non-Free software only if I am absolutely positively sure that it won't bite me in the ass. I don't miss Flash: all you get through proprietary tech is dancing Jesus, cat playing keyboard, and idiotic games that belong back in early 1990-ies. Richard Stallman is onto something when he says: don't use proprietary software. This passive attitude accounts for some 90% of "fighting for our rights".
Tabs STILL are not in their own processes like Chrome has done since day one. It does look like closing tabs reallocates memory though. So at least that seems to be fixed (it's been promised since, what, version 2?).
And this time it only took me one add-on (Status-4-Evar) to regain lost functionality.
What is 100% true is Microsoft are happy to leave 60% of their customers using their old insecure browsers. Some of whom only bought there OS last year.
Microsoft doesn't want people using their old browsers so their site to persuade people to change must be a decoy? http://www.ie6countdown.com./ And pushing their new browsers via Windows Update unless you take steps to prevent it must be smoke and mirrors?
Speaking of unsubstantiated, citation please for people who only bought "there" OS last year and are on old insecure browsers?
And when you talk about moving off IE6, you should start with the app developers... But don't let that get in the way of the fun.
Mozilla is doing good job improving Firefox
It's OK so far, I guess, but it doesn't have an OMGPonies plugin yet.
The visualization looks like some virus outbreak :)) :D
If this is so, Europe got a Firefox epidemic on its hands
Why would they even bother releasing before passing the acid test?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Flamebait? Okay, let's try this exercise: I'm going to take his post and change the names of those involved:
Microsoft is doing good job improving Internet Explorer. They hunted down and patched thousands of bugs from Internet Explorer 8. Not only that, they took the succesful look that Opera has and made Internet Explorer look as good as Opera. I wish they would make the interface a little bit snappier, but it's ok! They're also the only browser with Chrome to fight bad the big guys and doesn't support the evil H.264 - someones have to fight for our rights! And I hope Microsoft makes the next version as secure as Firefox with its sandboxing and all the extra security features Mozilla has build on FireFox.
Please explain to me how this post wouldnt' be considered paid-for-and-bought.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I use the awesomebar all the time. Its excellent are finding sites that I have found useful and not thought worth bookmarking. Its a feature I use.
Firefox (no sandbox) and Chrome (with a sandbox) were the only two browsers that didn't fall during the pwn2own contest this year. That means that Firefox (pre-release version) is more secure than IE9 (release version, with "extra security features").
OK so I browse to the eye candy page showing downloads. Not much going on there. *shrug* Going to guess it only works on firefox or is tripping my annoying flash banner blocker.
So download 4 and install. Browse there again. OK there it is. I'll admit it's sorta nifty Though we've all seen those fake counters on web pages before that have no base in reality so it makes me somewhat suspect how realistic it is. I'll give them benefit of the doubt though but it'd be nice if it said somewhere.
Why are my fans revving up? (looks at processor usage) OK wow. Open activity monitor. Imagine that, Firefox process is consuming 100% of one of my cores. Is that really necessary to draw some numbers and animate a few pips on a map? I'd need to be playing COD or something to get that out of an app usually. Let me guess, flash? And people can't understand why Apple wants it to go away.
But then again I'd bet it's more a problem of poor flash programming than anything else. Thanks Mozilla for making your new shiney look like a processor hog while you're trying to show it off.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Hows the add on compatibility?
I will not use a browser unless it has the following installed:
adblock plus
firebug
flashblock
ghostery
noscript
remove it permanently
xmarks
Hows rollback support, in case 4.0 doesn't work with adblock plus can I trivially roll back to my working 3.6.15 install? I know you can't expect modern windoze software to work as well as a .deb package from 1993 but I'm hoping for something better than "reformat, and reinstall"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Are you using Windows XP? I find that FF4 is slower than FF3.6 on my work computer (winXP) but faster on my home computer (vista). The new version renders using Direct2D on Vista and Win7, but uses software rendering on anything older. I'm sure you lose a lot in that mode of operation.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
And I hope Mozilla makes the next version as secure as IE9 with its sandboxing and all the extra security features Microsoft has build on Windows 7.
See divxo et al for more info. Still, it's good that the shills are learning. They are at least trying to emulate what they perceive to be a typical slashdotter's speech. Not that it's working just yet, but they are making some efforts. There are a lot of inconsistencies that they must iron out, though, so they should lurk moar. That's mostly for 4chan, not /., if you're taking notes (which I recommend you do).
also the only browser with Chrome to fight bad the big guys and doesn't support the evil H.264 - someones have to fight for our rights!
Whle there are some weird people out there, most people who are averse to corporations and patents refrain from phrasing their opinions as if they were five-year-olds. "Evil H.264" just don't cut it as believable material. But it's ok, at least it's an effort. I must point out, though, that if you're against the "big guys", you probably won't gratuitously draw attention to their product being so superior.
the succesful look that Opera has and made Firefox look as good as Opera
This was an understandable mistake. But most of us, if we really care enough to keep voicing our opinions about browsers, will pick one or two. I'm yet to see someone describing with such (poorly worded) passion all browsers. If Chrome, Opera, Firefox and IE9 are all so cool and good, I'd expect a "meh, all browsers are pretty competent nowadays", not "hey, Firefox is great, it's now as great as Opera is great, and Google rules because it defies "bad the big guys" and IE9 is so secure WOW so glad to b here guys!". To get a little more believable, how about choosing one browser to focus on as a favorite? Tell us why you use it etc. Make up some stories. It's cool, a lot of people here are doing it right now. Some are even becoming lawyers or war veterans, so retroactively using a software for a couple of days seems comparatively easy. I really wish for the shills to get better. They can still defend a product to their employer's heart's content, but doing so believably would be better for al of us. Not that quality is always necessary to blend in, since the standards aren't that high, but avoiding glaring oversights is, otherwise they'll only blend in with the trolls.
Windows 2000 will still run on modern PCs. OSX 10.4 won't, because the desktop versions of it only ran on PPC, whereas modern Macs run Intel chips now.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You're stupid.
I actually love the awesome bar. I don't bookmark anything anymore.
New bugs are better than old bugs.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
The download stats page looks like the movie Wargames. Or real life if you just want to focus on the middle east portion.
I have numerous dev/test sites with similar addresses that change name/config almost weekly. With Firefox/awesomebar, I can just type the differentiator directly into the browser instead of making a bookmark (which in a week or two will be out of date anyway).
As a web engineer, Firefox has no peer yet. Chrome/Safari are nice, and do offer features and speed that FF doesn't (at least on OSX), but Firefox (thanks to awesomebar) keeps me productive in a very dynamic work environment.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I didn't say you were paranoid, you must have imagined that.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The original post is actually microsoft astroturfing with a mozilla wrapper. Notice how the comment ends with Microsoft...Windows 7.
An AC pointed out the timestamp issue, was *corrected*, and others have pointed out this type of behaviour from various posters with IDs in the same general range as the OP.
Tinfoil hats? I dunno, but the fact that MobileTatsu-NJG's post was modded *Flamebait*, by anyone (though it's certain to be corrected, since it's become OBVIOUS that it's not even remotely fb....) speaks volumes.
cheers,
I contribute to software development only if it is FLOSS [...] I don't miss Flash: all you get through proprietary tech is [...] idiotic games that belong back in early 1990-ies.
What well-known FLOSS games can you think of that aren't stuck in the Super NES era of game design? Can you think of any that were FLOSS from day one, or whose data files are also free, or both?
OMG! Someone said something positive on /.! It must be a paid shill! Just assume the complement made to IE9 was done as a cover-up and we can continue to be hateful basement-dwellers.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Nice to see that the trolls about the fictitious memory leaks aren't deterred by the problem having been fixed quite a few revisions ago. I've never seen Firefox 4.0 use more than 400mb ever, and even then it was due to an extension with a memory leak. As soon as I got rid of that the memory usage maxed out at a respectable 250mb.
When I first fired it up, my first thought was: "Yuk, What happened to the fonts?"
Some searching revealed this is the MS Win7 DirectWrite Font rendering(IE 9 does the same thing).
Disable HW acceleration and all is well with my fonts.
Why does DirectWrite font rendering look so awful? Do other people actually prefer this (fonts are thicker and closer to together).
I like quite a few things about Firefox 4. Its Javascript performance is clearly improved. The one thing I'm not a big fan of is the new minimalist GUI. The icons are too small, they have all the colour sucked out of them, and there are no 24x24 icons on Windows/OSX anymore. It does seem a lot like copying Chrome for copying's sake.
Luckily there's a theme that gets back all the Firefox 3 colourful toolbar goodness (and includes its larger icons), if anyone's interested. It's here:
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
MS doesn't want to leave any of its customers using old, insecure browsers. In fact, it is just the opposite. They want to sell them an upgrade. And if they get two upgrades in one (browser and OS) then they are <charliesheen>winning!</charliesheen>.
- doug
Was thinking it was really sad to see how few downloads there are in Japan, until I checked the time - it's 3am.
OTOH it's not very late in Africa, and there are even fewer downloads there. Ah, Africa! Birthplace of our species, now the most impoverished continent on Earth. Ye have been well screwed over, Africa.
OMG! Someone said something positive on /.! It must be a paid shill!
Take a good look at the accusations of 'shill' lately.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'm using Centos 5.3 in a university lab. The outdated nature of this Linux has been pretty frustrating - it's almost impossible to install anything new. I couldn't put Google Chrome on here, for example, or a recent version of The Gimp.
I just put Firefox 4 on here and it's damn sexy. It performs great, it was easy to install on the Linux box, the graphics are much nicer than FF 3, it gives RAM back to the system when I close tabs. There's less chrome so I get more browsing space on my monitor, without sacrificing any functionality at all. Bravo, Firefox team.
So did you have some point to this post? The point is that despite supposedly "fighting for freedom" Google still widely uses H.264. VP8 seems to be nothing more than Google's way to make more money by pushing a video format into home entertainment devices and by being able to more easily monetize WebM videos. It's funny how so many people buy this bogus shit about "freedom" from a corporation who uses little crumbs thrown at the FOSS community in order to placate them whilst bringing in more fists full of money.
You can change it back to a normal menu bar with 2 clicks. Same applies to the annoying tabs-on-top thing.
I initially hated the awesome bar, though I've rather grown to like it. I use it as a search function for my bookmarks.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
i have been using firefox beta since its realease there is not much difference in linux ... what so ever they call... speed is improved that it
no hardware accleration for linux
nothing much more .............
They may be using the "Universal Binary" icon, but that seems to mean something else these days (the binaries contain i386 and amd64 architectures, no ppc).
Who was buying XP in 2010?
Big financial corporations, like Smith Barney, and Chase Manhattan. In 2010, these companies upgraded a lot of their desktops from old XP desktops, to new XP desktops.
I'm using a Nokia Booklet 3G laptop with Windows 7. Sadly it appears that hardware "accelerated" rendering is actually slower on this laptop than the traditional rendering method. After disabling the acceleration from FF4's settings the browser's speed is again adequate.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
What the hell is an awesome bar?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
>>>new version renders using Direct2D on Vista and Win7, but uses software rendering on anything older
+1 informative.
Looks like I'll be using 3.6 for a long, long time since I have no plans to move my laptop or desktop from XP (unless they die, of course).
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Maybe I'm gettting nostalgic... but I really can't get comfortable with the new layout. Is there an addon bringing back the entire pre-4.0 UI of Firefox? Or most of it if not everything.
Perhaps the UI designers would say that this shiny new thing is more efficient at browsing pages or whatever... However I just don't like it.
Also: I get Bing in my search bar after the upgrade. Removed, but what's that doing there? Did Mozilla get paid to put it here?
Yep, because Microsoft makes a mint off of spending all their time patching old vulnerabilities in software that was paid for 10 years ago. They have no incentive whatsoever to get people to upgrade.
There's an extension for that, but it can't use the usual ctrl+tab shortcut due to limitations.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kmnkpiehgjcaglobbfkejlkffdibncda
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
as seen in Chrome and Firefox 4.
And it's even worse in Safari.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/whatsnew/
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is there any way to stop the tabs in the tab bar from animating and sliding around? Prefer the old way if possible.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm running 3.6.15 extensionless and quite often it balloons up to 1.5GB RSIZE with 7 or 8 tabs open. So, I'll crawl back under the bridge now.
Some details on how the download visualization works: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2011/03/22/how-glow-mozilla-org-gets-its-data/
I just installed it on a crappy old Dell 260 (P4 2.0ghz) with 768mb ram and it launched and brought up websites way faster than 3.6.15 did.
There's been a known bug for all of Firefox 3 where all Live Bookmarks were refreshed on start. As this was done in the foreground process, this meant that if you have too many live bookmarks, it can take a while for Firefox to actually start up. I have over 120 live bookmarks, and Firefox 3 takes about five minutes to be usable. Which was entirely responsible for me switching my main browsing to Chrome, keeping Firefox only for checking my RSS feeds once a day.
Is this bug finally fixed, or is it STILL an issue?
Running FF4 om XP at work and notice it is sucking up 120,424k of memory making it the largest user of system memory by far. Chrome on the other hand is only 29,496k and I can't say what IE uses as I don't use that for anything. Yeah yeah memory is cheap and I have plenty but still a browser imho should not be the number one resource hog on your system.
But they're all still using IE6! *rollyeyes*
As always, we posted the portable version within a few hours over at PortableApps.com. As we did an extended test of version 4.0 portably following the whole 4.0 beta and RC process, it's turned out to be a nice, stable release. It's great for running from your flash drive, DropBox or just trying out a new firefox install without affecting your local one.
Release Announcement | Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 homepage
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I initially hated the awesome bar, though I've rather grown to like it. I use it as a search function for my bookmarks.
Agreed. It's faster for me to hit CTRL+L, then type 'mess' --> Enter, than to go click my slashdot messages link.
Plus it's great for those articles you read but never bookmark. A couple of keywords later, and you've found it again.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
If you're a logmein user, be cognizant that the plugin doesn't yet work with Firefox 4. Won't even install.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Subscribers were already mentioned, but the Firehose also shows stories currently in the queue..
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I didn't like this in IE7 and now I don't like it in FF 4. I customize my home page and use the home button to get to it quickly. Having the button be a little tiny thing on the far right of the screen is annoying.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Your sarcasm is funny, but it's well known that new releases often have more "holes" than the older releases that have been around for a few years and extensively debugged by users.
As example: I recently upgraded to the latest SeaMonkey browser, and inexplicably the "undo closed tab" function no longer works. It worked just fine in Beta 1, so why would it be broke in Beta 2? According to YOU that should not happen (newer is better), but obviously something went "a little ka-ka* and so I reverted back down.
*
* Quantum Leap reference.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
I used to when I was a subscriber. But I've lapsed subscriptions ever since they insisted on Paypal to pay for it. They should go back to credit cards. That said, there's something weird with viodlos. I don't think he's an MS shill simply because I can't believe they'd be so inept. He keeps grabbing first posts and adding in Microsoft references. I think he's just trying to troll or false-flag by pretending to be an MS shill. Though genuine obsessed independent is possible I suppose. It's counter-productive to MS, whatever the reason.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What the hell is an awesome bar?
A ridiculously over the top name for the fact that the Firefox address bar throws in bookmarks as part of it's autocomplete as well as doing some bizarre attempt at predicting what URL you are typing and putting what it thinks is most likely near the top. In my experience, it gets it all wrong and is irritating as Hell.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This is not true. FF4 uses DirectX9 on XP to accelerate the compositing / rendering of web content.
The only time when it uses software rendering is when your graphics drivers are not recent enough, and that's true for both XP and Win Vista / 7. the one thing Vista and 7 have over XP is support DirectWrite, which is part of DirectX 10 so of course, doesn't work on XP.
It's ALL Javascript and HTML5.
no flash.
Only if I didn't have to target IE7 at work...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Gee I don't know. I was going to say Warsow, but it actually comes with non-Free art. Anyway, this is exactly my point: the only quality non-Free content is pure entertainment. Its value is entirely subjective. My cat it just as entertaining to me as the best PC game I ever played. We all know people whose idea of ultimate fun time involves running 3 miles per day in an urban environment. Even though we may have to pay monopoly prices for some kinds of entertainment, we are not shut out of any area with actual utility. No one is holding a gun to our head: the very best and the most useful parts of Internet render just fine with Free software.
There's a Linux 64-bit version, why has there never been a 64-bit release for Windows?
Right now, many key extensions (NoUn buttons, verttabbar, Reload_on_DoubleClick and a few others) are not ported yet. I have one test machine set up and I am adding extensions as they become available. Once the UI gets usable again I will upgrade all machines.
You employ web standards terribly! Good work!
for the last 3 hrs, i have been glancing back at this map, refreshing it to see how well it works and if i can catch anything.
the counter seems to be modest, in that when refreshing there are actually more DLrs than predicted.
aside from the occasional blip out in the middle of the pacific (NOT Hawaii) the only blip that stands out seem to be Toronto. it blips so frequently that it never turns off.
I'd like to see the City's ranking list after the first 24hs or 48hr to see how this all went down.
perhaps even a flow cart of the wave going across earth as time zones alter the download rates.
What's up with Alfred, NY?
Every day, Federal scientists are looking for new ways to kill bugs.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Yeah, who is that guy?!
Print preview can be enabled in about:flags.
I just wish that for one major iteration Mozzilla would stop adding half baked new stuff and concentrate in eliminating all the bugs, all this crazy memory and processor peaks that come from nowhere (no, it's not my system, it happens both in my iMac and my MacBook pro) and reworked the plugin system to work correctly (if Safari and Chrome can install and update plugins witouth restarting, so can you). I've been using the Firefox 4 RC since beta 4 and these nasty bugs remain there.
Really, I started with Firefox in my Windows days, because it was much lighter on the resources and less bloated than IE ... but look at what it became?
If it wasn't for the tab scrolling feature that Safari still doesn't have, I wouldn't think twice in ditching Firefox.
No one bought Windows XP netbooks in early 2010?
I'm rather surprised that so many Slashdot users complain about the default settings in FF4. Yes, they changed the toolbar, statusbar, tab location etc.... But every single one of those things can be changed with in-browser settings or extensions. In my mind, those aren't problems - that's exactly what makes Firefox a great browser. Isn't this a site for nerds?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I really do find the notion of "app tabs" to be very useful. It's a small tab designed for frequently accessed pages such as your webmail (or slash dot), just showing the icon instead of the web page title. My only hope is that they provide some persistence for these tabs. I'd love if the first firefox window I opened contained my saved app tabs.
I've been using FF4 betas since Beta 9, and memory usage has shot up from 3.x (on WinXP). I figured, hey, it's a beta, they'll fix it in release, it probably has a bunch of debug stuff in it. So today I got my spanking new workstation, put Win7 on it, and here's the memory usage as reported by Windows Task Manager (top 2 lines):
SLDWORKS.exe - 364,348k
firefox.exe *32 - 327,484k
Solidworks, for those who don't know, is a rather large 3D CAD program, it has a relatively small assembly with about 100 parts loaded. FF has been running for about 2 hours, on a mix of websites, with a total of 7 tabs open across 3 windows. Fresh install, with Firefox Sync as the only add-in. What in the world is FF doing with all that memory?
*sigh*
Some of you may have noticed me complain about the UI implemented in chrome recently or crop up in many firefox threads over the years.
Essentially, Firefox 3 is all I need in a browser (with about 4 plugins) it does everything I could possibly want. The only thing I want is speed. I don't care how much computing resources it takes, I want the option to turn on as much caching and multi threading as possible and just have ridiculous fast browsing (ludicrous speed infact)
I believe FF4 is actually faster, despite the ghastly copying of Chromes UI, at least you can disable the tabs up top option, although the status bar change requires a plugin to put it back where it belongs IIRC. However when is the multi threaded or process per tab stuff coming? I've been browsing the web since lynx and that was the only time I recall web pages being fast enough.
I installed a package called "easy DNS" under XP once which handled DNS caching very well, it definitely improved browsing response times, I'd like to see better caching of entire pages with firefox, regardless of memory use. I have 4 cores, 8 threads, 6gb of ram and an SSD - please make the web absoloutely as fast as possible.
Heres to hoping firefox 5 works on speed and not copying features from the competition.
It's a college town, with both a state and private university, but both are pretty small. It's also got (at least did 15 years ago) a decent comp-something program, although nothing near the scale of RIT. Its biggest claim to fame is the fact that it's a college out in the middle of nowhere.
Somehow I doubt they've downloaded more copies in Alfred than all of California and Texas combined.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Can you at least turn off Cleartype in FF4? IE9 forces it on for any page in any application rendered by mshtml.dll and it looks like crapola.
I've NEVER liked Firefox. I've used a lot of different browsers over the years. About 6 different versions of Opera, several versions of Safari, a handful of Chrome. All of them have been better than Firefox in some way. IE was more compatible than FF, Opera was faster and had more interesting, innovative features. That speed-dial feature? It was in Opera first. Tabs, too.
Safari was great for a while. Excellent rendering engine, highly compatible, nice layout, SIMPLE. Chrome did it one or two or three better, and generally has a better interface and more speed than anything else.
Firefox was good for a time because it was the LEAST BAD option. It was never the BEST option, as near as I can reckon. I try it on and off, just to see if it's gotten any better or is worth switching to, and it NEVER IS. The plugins have never interested me, since the better browsers always seem to have functionality built in that FF needs to plugin. The stuff that isn't good enough to be built into the browser, by and large, doesn't need to exist at all. :/
Is 4.0 going to be better? Can I compare it to Chrome and objectively find reasons that it's worth the (admittedly minimal) effort of re-importing my bookmarks? Or is it more of the same mediocrity that I've come to expect?
As far as I know, the prediction is based on what you actually go for after writing something, so if you write "s" and keep selecting slashdot, you will get slashdot as the first suggestion. I like the awesome bar. It is awesome. (well, actually it's just very good, but close enough). I don't really care about the bookmark suggestions (and I rarely get them), but the matches from history are useful.
It is what it is.
> So, I can't use it. Using OS X 10.4.11 or whatever it is. They support Windows 2000, but not OS X 10.4 :/
The nice thing about open source is if one group doesn't want to support it, then someone else can. What you want now is TenFourFox located here: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
Restores the ability to run on OS X 10.4 PPC and 10.5 PPC, and has extra PPC model specific optimizations as well.
Not while I was watching, anyway.
Are you people too busy transferring scientific data, supply orders for the coming winter, and personal messages to SOs thousands of miles away to burn your precious link bandwidth getting the latest, coolest, most Mozilla-ish browser available?
The thing with Mac OS X is that apple sort of goes out of their way to make it hard to support multiple versions at once. For a simple example, there is no text measurement API that works on both 10.4 and 10.6: if you want to support both in an app that needs to measure text (something a browser sort of has to do), you need two different codepaths.
So the options were to support only 10.4 and 10.5, support only 10.5 or 10.6, or do lots more work (way more than needed to support Win2k/XP while also supporting Vista/7) to support all three. Given the fraction of the user base, even just the Mac user base, on 10.4, it was decided to not support it.
Note that all the discussion about this is publicly archived (and happened on public mailing lists in the first place) if you care to read it...
I want the old statusbar back. This new thing is lot less informative, not to mention clunky-looking with a close button permanently etched on it.
But that's not all, what is with this Google Chrome envy? Sheesh. Not funny or impressive.
As one could expect, half of plugins ceased to function and there are no updates available. Gee, how am I not surprised? And Mozilla really plans to push through 3-4 Major Revisions during 2011? Get outta here.
Overall, having "experienced" Firefox 4.x, I decided to stick to Firefox 3.6.x. I never moved beyond Thunderbird 2.x either, having witnessed the disaster known as Thunderbird 3.x. I think Firefox 4.x was the decisive moment, when Firefox became useless/obsolete.
It can really pay off to do some optimizing of your userChrome.css file. For example, one thing that annoyed me greatly was that the tabs don't move next to the menu, losing precious vertical screen estate. And most of the context menu entries just get in the way. All of this is fixable without any plugins or whatever. There are many examples of annotated userChromes around, if you're anything beyond a casual user it pays off to have a quick look.
What the guy is probably talking about is low rights mode, which is why I'm starting to move my customers AWAY from Firefox to Chromium based Comodo Dragon. I mean for the love of Pete the tech has been out since 2007 and FF STILL doesn't support it? WTH? It didn't seem to take the webkit based any time at all to add support, so what's up?
And I'm sorry, despite what some of those here say right now it is more dangerous to use FF than IE 9 because without low rights mode FF is running with the same privileges as the user whereas IE 9 is running at the MUCH lower guest privileges. Look at it this way: Everyone made fun of XP because of running as admin, right? And we ALL agree that least privileges for the task are the most secure way, yes? So why would you want the browser which runs untested third party code off the web and is the closest to "bare metal" with the wild and dangerous web, running with higher privileges than necessary?
So I hope they have added supported for low rights mode, surely after 4 years it should be finished. I also hope they fixed the memory leak issues I've been having on older office machines where FF uses memory when you watch videos and never seems to give it back so after half a day of use it has sucked up ALL the RAM and you have to close and restart. I really hope FF 4 is all that and a bag of chips. Because frankly after all the trouble I've been having with the 3.6.x branch, along with the risk of giving FF to anyone on a modern OS, I've been switching my customers over and so far they are happy.
I'd rather stick with FF but it is my job to keep them safe, and right now FF doesn't do that and sadly the other poster is right, right now IE 9 is MUCH safer thanks to lower privileges than FF, although I'd rather avoid IE all together and just switch them over to Chromium.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Command-P, Preview.
Isn't it nice when you have a sane printing method in your OS? How about "Save as PDF?" or "Save as PostScript"?
you could still buy windows xp based netbooks as late as q4 2010.
Can anyone recommend alternatives to all the new "whiz-bang" bullshit that's put in browsers today?
Now that Firefox has truly gone the way of Netscape and IE with the bloat, I'd really like to get back to a bare-bones browser that simply provides the openness for the plugins I need, and GTFO with everything else.
I'm weary of Chrome, and Firefox is just worthless to me now (crashes, slow, etc).
Yeah this is a biased comment, but I figured the people with the same requirements as I have will probably understand and respond. I hope!
I am surprised they still offer no 64 bit build download options for Linux and other OS's. I doubt it would make much difference, but it seems odd now that it is 2011...
http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/ (Windows-based tool only)
Works great.
Provide download URL, downloads file (you pick quality level, I just leave it at "best quality available")
Then as a separate action, you can convert a file you've downloaded. Convert to MP3, or various video formats (for mobile devices, for example) are available.
Free (not GPL free), works great. What I use for making HLSS clips for my Source games...(then have to convert the MP3 to the proper audio format for Source, but that's Audacity's job)
I am really disappointed by their changes to "streamline" the session manager. You can nuke the previous state by opening the browser, closing it (accidents can happen), and opening it again. All because they didn't want to automatically restore it when Firefox starts.
What was it that Microsoft claimed? 2.4 million in the first 24 hours? Nice to see that Firefox is up at 2.8 million and counting. Obviously many more fools out there like me who run Linux and want new, shiny toys but refuse point blank to ever let IE onto our system.
Seriously though, I quite like the new FF - seems fairly minimal to me, the add-ons I want work (Ad-Block is all I find I need), and no problems with memory so far on my old 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM Laptop.
No argument here, but until about a week ago IE8 was Microsoft's current browser which is compatible with XP. I have to admit I tried a netbook with XP, then one with Vista, and then one with Windows 7 and to use a word: "yikes". So I can't personally verify that those newer netbooks will run IE8 so if I'm wrong I'm wrong, but at some point you have to cut a 10.5 year old OS loose.
I did sound crabby but I didn't like his tone and I'm still bitter for using XP and IE6/7 for so long because of a couple corporate business critical apps that I didn't use. Deep breaths... Deep breaths...
Who prints to papers these days? J/K. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There is a feature in my version of Chromium on the about:flags page that says:
Enable better omnibox history matching
Enables substring and multi-fragment matching within URLs from history.
This seems to let me type a piece of bookmark name and then match the bookmark in the fashion you described but its certainly not on by default.
in practice, security vulnerabilities seem to be found more often in legacy code that was written before proper bounds checking was recognized as a major issue.
If array bounds checking was ever "not recognised as a major issue" then I fear for the programming industry.
Programming is an exact precision discipline based on mathematics and yet we can't even guarantee to get simple 'X+1=Y' maths right? Ouch.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Firefox routinely hits between one and two gigs with a half-dozen to a dozen tabs open for me, as well- give it 9-12 hours, and it's unmanageable.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
The problem is that 3D on Linux can be charitably described as a complete fucking mess. It is a bunch of standards, many outdated, that result in drivers that don't work well.
So the binary nVidia drivers work great. They do that by more ore less replacing all the stuff with their own implementation. Fine, but that only applies to a subset of the population. You have to have an nVidia card and you have to be one of the people who is ok with closed source.
The rest? Well they have really bad problems, like X totally blows up and every thing crashes problems, when you try and make use of hardware acceleration as FF needs. Hence it gets disabled.
Basically Linux needs a better model for graphics drivers, and then needs drivers that are properly coded to that and bug free. Then hardware acceleration will work.
i have a 10.4 install on my intel based mac mini.
There's an Anti-Aliasing Tuner plugin.
Also note that Win2K support will be going away once the switch is made to start compiling with MSVC 2010 instead of 2005. Win2K support in Fx4 is more by accident than by design at this point.
I don't understand how that works. There are a lot of blinks on the map, and very little coord-like data returned from the server in JSON format (and almost no other data besides that).
They've been running that trope for about the last 6 months with over a dozen iterations of 4.0 beta.
And it's not been pretty all the way through.
I contribute to software development only if it is FLOSS [...] I don't miss Flash: all you get through proprietary tech is [...] idiotic games that belong back in early 1990-ies.
What well-known FLOSS games can you think of that aren't stuck in the Super NES era of game design? Can you think of any that were FLOSS from day one, or whose data files are also free, or both?
I love this post. There are very few games stuck in the Super NES era, although it had some incredible 2D games the like of which we will never see again, but trying to paint FLOSS gaming 2D; 512 × 478 resolution with a maximum 32768 colors is a lie. The Irony is Commercial gaming on a PS has become a poor relation to its console counterpart often limited by what a console can so :). Lets be honest FLOSS gaming is 3D 32bit any resolution. The game I play most at the moment is SuperTuxKart http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/ and its my pick simply because its a great genre, and it is a project that is moving and shaking at the moment.
What is 100% true is Microsoft are happy to leave 60% of their customers using their old insecure browsers. Some of whom only bought there OS last year.
Microsoft doesn't want people using their old browsers so their site to persuade people to change must be a decoy? http://www.ie6countdown.com./ And pushing their new browsers via Windows Update unless you take steps to prevent it must be smoke and mirrors?
Speaking of unsubstantiated, citation please for people who only bought "there" OS last year and are on old insecure browsers?
And when you talk about moving off IE6, you should start with the app developers... But don't let that get in the way of the fun.
I'm taking about IE6/IE7/IE8 and will soon be taking IE9. The way you could tell is that I referring to the 60% market share it has currently. Do you really need a citation when you have market figures. Most people have there computers for five years, most of those 60% will be machines bought in those past five years. I don't talk about IE6 ever being a problem. I might talk about bundling a browser and making inseparable from the OS, or being dependent on Microsoft technology instead of Open Standards. I clicked a button and have Firefox installed...and can remove and replace it with a couple of clicks. XP users can't do that.
You're not losing anything.
Remember that there is no such thing as Direct2D on Windows XP, so no version of Firefox (or any other browser) has had or will have Direct2D acceleration on Windows XP.
Firefox 4 does however add Direct3D compositing acceleration on certain video adapters - which is used at a higher level such as when elements overlay other elements.
The suggestion that Firefox 4 uses less acceleration than previous, or other, browsers on XP is mythical.
Why is this a reason to use Firefox 3.6? 3.6 used software-only rendering on all platforms.
What's new here is Firefox 4's Direct2D acceleration on Vista and above, and Direct3D or OpenGL acceleration on all other systems. Remember that there is no such thing as Direct2D on Windows XP.
Gabe, is that you?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's OK so far, I guess, but it doesn't have an OMGPonies plugin yet.
But it does have a Side Saddle plugin. Is that close enough?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Lets be honest FLOSS gaming is 3D 32bit any resolution.
But how close do the production values, such as level of mesh/texture/shader detail and the length of campaigns, in games released as free software from day one come to those of commercial Xbox 360 games?
I do, works fine over here, especially after you tweak it by disabling UAC. It's my computer and I have a good antivirus and if worse comes to worse, I'll just reinstall the machine and restore data from backups, which to this date hasn't been necessary. Pretty stable system for me even if it sounds surprising to you.
Same here, went back to Chrome, especially because of font rendering and speed. I did download the so called font tweaker for Firefox and it reminds me a lot of the font issues in Linux. You still get crappy output no matter the setting.
Linux doesn't accelerate the ff windows either, you can see it in about:support at the bottom.
I just went to right click on a link to open it in a new tab out of habit and found it in a new window. why did they swap the position of open in new tab and open in new window on the right click? This is going to be a old habit to break if I can't change them back Other than that it seems pretty good
I am glad to hear this news.but I have not felt the need to upgrade my mozilla into the new version
There are an awful lot of glowing blips from all over Japan. Is that plausible?
Why abandon the dominant desktop OS when it provides sandboxing features that other apps can and do make use of?
I mean if you want to marginalise your browser and kill your market share, fine - but otherwise that idea would be stupid.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I just upgraded, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to take the tour. I click on everything and nothing actually does anything. Then I looked through the javascript and found out the link to enter the tour, eventually got to a page that loaded, but then none of the tour steps on that page worked. Also, loading up that "welcome to ff 4, what's new" page looks like garbage in every other browser. The exact same, but garbage. I know it doesn't NEED to support anything besides FF4, but why doesn't it? What is so unique to FF 4 that it cant at least display in chrome or opera?
insight through the mind
Just downloaded it to discover it doesn't support my old G5 Mac. Boo hoo!
Anyone who wants to get on a plane? ;)
I don't get your joke. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The thing I see people printing most often is boarding passes.
Ah. I haven't been in airports for years nor flew since August of 1993. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ok, I installed FF4 on Windows XP - from launch to display of the iGoogle home page was about 4 seconds - not great, but better than FF3.6...
Then again, IE8 does it in about 2.5 seconds, and Chrome in barely 1.5 seconds.
Firefox still has a long way to go to remove all that bloat it's built up over the last few years...
Ok I've used it for a day or so, and one thing I can say about Firefox 4 is that I'm glad to get my vertical desktop space back. Browsers seemed to be getting more and more verbose and colorful and gimmicky (not helped by every free software package wanting to add another toolbar) and on a small screen (netbook, slate) you ended up with a huge chunk of wasted real-estate and a little space on the bottom that had the actual content. (Well, I don't mean "you" literally, as geeks can figure out how to turn most of that off, but geeze, ever see my mother-in-law's browser?)
So far, I'm having a little trouble navigating the smaller, simpler interface, but I'm 100% for the philosophy behind it. And I think my usage will improve with time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Virtually every booking these days is over the net. Sometimes you can get away with reference nrs. Other times you need to print out vouchers, bar codes or whatnot. Often the important bits are enclosed by several pages of dense legalese that you don't need. Sometimes the content you need can be tweaked to fit on a single page instead of two by scaling it slightly. You need print preview, especially with ink jet printers to save paper & ink.
In theory, security vulnerabilities are just like any other bug, but in practice, security vulnerabilities seem to be found more often in legacy code that was written before proper bounds checking was recognized as a major issue
Nah, with quite a few exploits behind me, I can debunk this. It's simply that older code is always less bloated, which makes exploits easier.
Find on older software, then check to see whether it also works on new software. Often it does. If not, publish anyhow.
I don't really have a problem with non-free game art. If the source code is available you will be able to play the game as long as there is someone to adjust things for newer systems, and playability is the main utility of a game. Furthermore, additions generally get a free pass, so even a game with non-free assets can evolve.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I was under the impression that the only version of 10.4 released for Intel was OSX Server 10.4.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
10,000,000 downloads at 4:20pm on 23 March, 2011.
Surely someone was celebrating that milestone correctly.
Hell, I don't even have a problem with non-free game code, as long as I run it on a dedicated piece of hardware (like a console), completely isolated from any computing that actually matters. It's only a toy.
Can't say i've experienced any difference in text rendering with IE9 compared to IE8. Video driver issues perhaps? I run cleartype on everything...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Ditto here. I ran vista and quite happily between 2007 and 2010.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Apparently you're flaming because you find the new Firefox good and are pointing out some stuff. Oh, Slashdot...
I am not devoid of humor.