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Firefox 4, A Day Later
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.
I have an interesting idea that Microsoft's marketing department are idiots.
which is totally what she said
...still propping up the Microsoft Monopoly after all these years!
Surely we all know what to expect from FF 5 and 6: whatever Chrome does next, implemented in a not-quite-as-good way....
Also remember to install it on public computers and at your school and make sure IE is removed from start menu and desktop.
Are you proposing a trojan that silently installs FF in the background? Yeah, that's going to work out really well for the reputation of FF.
Stupid idea is stupid.
Crikes.
--
BMO
I have an interesting idea on how we can drop IE's market share and gain more for Firefox. Someone should make a firefox installer that works without user, and we put those out on torrent sites as something else. Firefox gets installed on lots of people and internet is better again.
Most people that use torrent sites probably have firefox silly.
Is this guy really saying "wow, look, Firefox took forever to release a version which was just 0.5 higher, while Chrome went from 9 to 10 in four weeks."?
How the FFFFFFFFFUUUUUU- does a moron like this get hired to write a tech column?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
So one of the major thinsg to expect in FF5 is "UI animation"?
For some reason, this makes me feel kind of sad....
That is all.
And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while firefox will die.
IE has been getting faster, I can't say the same thing about Firefox.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The "IE will survive/firefox will die" article:
Firefox will die because it ONLY has extensions. It doesn't have an app ecosystem, and is therefore not buzzword compliant.
Erm, yeah.
Cause IE is a parasite and Microsoft wont let it die out. Windows is the host (though this is a parasite as well to) and IE is sucking it dry
Nah, we'll just be in awe of their mad skillz and ability to own us.
SSC
But people wont learn otherwise. Someone needs to teach them.
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I downloaded FF4 yesterday on my work machine. It seems like it takes longer to resolve any given url than FF3.whatever did. Once a page loads, then it zips through the page pretty snappily, but it definitely takes a bit longer to resolve the url in the first place.
That said, does anyone know how to change the loading icon in the upper left corner of a tab that is loading a page? Personally I don't want a damn thing on my computer to remind me of the Windows OS eye candy like that little circulating ring does.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
So ie6 => ie7 never happened?
As much as everyone at /. likes to hate... I think MS has done a pretty good job with IE9.
I have an interesting idea on how we can drop IE's market share and gain more for Firefox. Someone should make a firefox installer that works without user, and we put those out on torrent sites as something else. Firefox gets installed on lots of people and internet is better again.
Most people that use torrent sites probably have firefox silly.
If for no other reason than to block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with.
Maybe Firefox 4 is being downloaded more then IE9 because FF is a [b]release[/b] version and IE9 is a [b]release candidate[/b] version?
Not that I use either (Opera here), but if you want to compare the two, lets compare them right...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
To be honest, I'm not really sure what any of this article said, because I was too busy being mesmerized by the blinky lights on the Firefox download stats page.
The rest of us who value our extensions (add-ons, whatever) will continue to hang out here with the most recent 3.x until said extensions become supported in FF4. I'm not saying this is Mozilla's fault by any stretch, either. I just want to make sure I still have gestures, web developer, firebug, and so many more well-tested and confirmed working before I make the jump.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Why does this have to be some us versus them again.
How many people upgraded to Chrome 10?...who cares because the version don't really mean as much.
Firefox probably popped up and said 4 is available and people clicked okay.
IE won't do that for various reasons. Most windows client admins want this behavior because they want to control the rollout. That is part of the diversity...in some sense IE is a better option in large corporate environments and a worse one for individuals at home...aside from the standards stuff...from the purse install\app standpoint. If you don't work as a client admin for a firm of 10,000+ you might not get this and even if you do you won't want to admit it :).
Most admins just don't want to support the browsers. And all browsers when installed on 10,000s of machine whether they be Linux or Windows will sub-come to some sort of issue..broken profile blah blah.
As a web developer and a web surfer Firefox gives me nothing new. Chrome's built in developer tools are as good and in some cases better than Firebug. My extension survive between major versions. Chrome is so much faster it is sort of silly. Now IE 9 doesn't give me anything either except for some older sites working...but we are trying our best to get away from it...although I don't have some religious type of idealogy against...most people forget just how bad Navigator 4 was...and lets face it IE 4 thru 6 was IE 4. IE 7 and 8 was a patch. IE 9 at least is the first major re-write and they are taking standards seriously. Get on the W3C mailing lists...a lot of the froms are @microsoft.com asking thoughtful questions moving the standards forward. Like it or not MS has funded these standards.
I wonder if Firefox put Chrome and IE links on their home page. And said hey download these others and compare you'll come back. I wonder how many people would stay with Firefox? I suppose it will live on with the open source crowd who want no corporate sponsorship behind the browser and that is fine and dandy with me...but now that Android 3 is going to have native Chrome and Chrome netbooks come out I don't see a path were Firefox usage goes up....but it doesn't have to die and it doesn't have to be the IE killer.
It's not crazy to think the Firefox could lose market share, but it's more likely to lose that to Chrome and Safari (already happening) than to IE. Chrome really did make Firefox 3-3.5 look kind of bad. I switched almost immediately. Firefox 4 is a huge step up but it's catching up from behind now in the perceptions of many people. I think it will still have a strong showing, but the market share that might have normally gone to Firefox alone will now be split between the two, probably pretty evenly unless one of them does something really stupid.
It's also not crazy to think that IE is going to stick around, not because it's a better product or has an "app ecosystem" though. It's obvious that as long as there is a Microsoft and that Microsoft continues to make operating systems, there will also still be an IE and it will probably still be used by the majority of people running those OSes simply because most of them don't have a personally compelling reason to change that.
This guy came to the right conclusion all in all. He just got there by a really weird path.
Version numbers with decimal points and failing to use "App" to describe everything and anything more than basic HTML both prove that Firefox is dying.
This sentence no verb.
...it's doing so well. I suspect it's a bit of "oh well, it's too late now."
I personally love it but any of my friends and colleagues who are not exactly technical aces find it annoying and uncomfortable to use. Even after I guide them to the add-ons to replace their missing functionality complaints (primarily the status bar, and the new menu) they just say "Well why the hell do I have to download an addon to do that now? It was built right in!"
I don't see Firefox every rising above ~30-35%, due to fragmentation of the market:
- 1/3 for mozilla
- 1/3 for microsoft
- 1/3 for google
- Plus a few percentage points for "minor" browsers like Opera and Apple safari. Oh and if Firefox ever did "die", which I doubt, I'd sooner switch to Opera's opera or Mozilla's Seamonkey then IE.
I am forced to use IE with my Dialup provider (image compression only works with IE6/7/8), and it stinks. Mostly from the lack of features.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
> IE will survive, while firefox will die.
Probably. IE will live on at 30 -- 40% penetration solely due to being bundled with Windows, old fogies and unsophisticated users continuing to believe that IE is "the internet".
Firefox will probably go away at some point when Mozilla changes the name again.
There. Prediction confirmed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"Ed Bott's Microsoft Report" predicts that IE will survive and Firefox will die.
In other news a VCR said that VHS ain't going nowhere...
(And what's worse, the fkuc up is making arguments based on major version number delta over time. Such uncanny insight is rare!)
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
But when you think about this development process and naming convention that Chrome uses and FF is going to use, are we eventually going to be comparing Chrome 65 to Firefox 48? And eventually Chrome 138 and Firefox 172? Putting aside software engineering and release cycle concerns, it would seem incrementing the number on each release might be a bad idea.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I love that page. I've been watching it for the past day. You can tell where daylight is by the download rates.
Even Europe slows down at night, but those europians seem to be up at all hours....
I love it when a pacific island lights up.
"When Can I Use?" (http://www.caniuse.com/) updated right away that the current version Firefox is 4. Must be database driven to update everything so fast. Anyway, with "All" features selected, the final Summary lists current Firefox only 3% behind current Chrome and 10% ahead of current Safari. Of course, "When Can I Use?" is supported by Google to highlight Chrome's strengths in new technologies.
It's kinda sad, isn't it? Apple contributed WebKit to open source, Google used it to get a quick presence in the browser market, and now Google doesn't contribute its HTML5/CSS3/etc code back to the project to return the favor. Hmm, I wonder why?
Firefox 3 came with the totally worthless "awesomebar" that suggests all kinds of things that are not the least relevant to the url you start to type. Has this been fixed in FF4, or have they perhaps ruined more things?
I don't think that it would be healthy for the net to rise much about that 30-35% range. One of the problems that Firefox had to address early on was the after math of one of the two browsers losing the battle for market share. At least with 3 dominant browsers you'd be in a much better situation trying to claw back in.
Firefox is currently at about 42%, and it's not even its higher share (w3schools browser statistics).
Mostly harmless.
FF4 behaves like it went on a diet, fast and snappy like it used to be.
I approve.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"ie will survive, firefox will die" -> that possibility went out of the window by eu commissions mandating of the browser ballot box in europe.
Read radical news here
What kind of sense does this article make?
"Businesses and consumers will want to use the same browser that powers their installed apps. In the PC space, that means Google or Microsoft. It doesn’t leave room for a third player."
Huh?
Last time I checked, Google and Microsoft stuff works just fine in Firefox.
Also, last time I checked, Apple iPhone/iPad/iPod apps are not run by the browser... so where is Chrome and IE again?
And let's just forget about the 55% Windows XP market share... LOL.
Note to self: Ed Bott is an idiot.
I want my tabs just where they are now.
We are all God's parents.
I'm pretty sure that MSIE is only available for one of the four operating systems I use every day.
I am using Firefox Minefield 4.0b13pre which is updated almost daily. Could anybody tell me if it is OK to use this as the "final" release? I do not want to download and install the "retail" version.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What he's saying is that MS could have slapped a user interface on the IE9 platform previews, and release as fast as Google. Now what is the difference with the 12 Firefox 4 beta's? I'd call these more usable than the platform previews.
Also, he ignores the fact that Firefox has a 3-month release cycle now, while IE is still on a 2-year schedule.
IE certainly couldn't get any slower, so a comparison in terms of speed increase between versions isn't worth much.
Are you saying that
when fixing a problem, fixing a problem doesn't fix a problem?
Google is able to turn out new browsers quickly because it uses WebKit to render its pages. MSIE 9 uses Trident (MS's own) and Firefox uses Gecko (Mozilla's own).
Microsoft did not update Trident "over night." It has been going on for a very long time.
For Ed to assert that Google and Microsoft took a similar route on anything is simply inaccurate.
All this nonsense about "faster browsers" is already out the window due to this movement to hardware acceleration. Now different browsers will perform differently based on the hardware present, the level of support for the hardware and more. Linux is still the red-headed stepchild where hardware support is concerned. This is especially the case where graphics drivers are concerned. Microsoft does not have to worry about this because it controls the platform it supports. Google and Mozilla and more write for more than Windows and operate against the APIs which are known and documented.
Despite all of Microsoft's tremendous resources and programming talent, they are still not producing a standards compliant browser on par with Chrome or Firefox. I can't believe it is due to a lack of talent or resources. It must be for some other reason and I suspect it has to do with backward compatibility and possibly even maintaining the appearance that "all other browsers are broken" as users seem to perceive.
Mozilla has already done enough damage in the UI department with fonts under Windows. Oh god the pain, it's like every character suddenly went on the Fat Albert diet and became bold.
Also E. Coli and HIV will. While Leonardo, Bach and Einstein already died.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6.
I have a great idea. Let's rename FireFox 4/later to Chrome II. That way it would be easier for me to group browsers by their uselessness together.
No title bar, no status bar, bare minimum configuration, fancy useless UI animations => Chrome => safe to ignore.
And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while firefox will die.
LOL. For some time one of the Web interfaces (think corpo-ware) sold by my employer was broken under IE. Nobody noticed. For two+ years.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
This guy is using precious oxygen that clearly could be going to a more deserving cause. Like helping rust bridges, or something.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
They say we are creatures of habit. My Home ICON moved to the right!! Thinkpad Touchpad vertical scrolling refused to work.
Ok, found solutions. Moved Home ICON using customization. Had to download latest Thinkpad Synaptics driver to make Touchpad scrolling work. (why the heck one has to download Touchpad driver for Firefox upgrade is beyond me)
Oh, brought the tabs below.
They say, if you look at ugly goat long enough, you will like her beauty :)
what to expect for FF 5 and 6
Expect Firefox 4.1 and 4.2.
block all the obnoxious and possibly malware ads that torrent sites are infested with
Here's an idea. You could, you know, not frequent sites that routinely deal in illegal stuff to avoid other nasty stuff. Kind of like not going to the bad parts of town, ya know?
Yah, yah, I know, there's that one joint in Sin City that makes a great burrito, but guess what, it's mostly crack dealers and thugs. Strictly legit torrents tend to be published from original sites that don't attack you.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
No, not at all. In fact in the DOZENS of answers to this VERY question that is posted on EVERY Firefox article on /. for the past year or so are lying. There's NO WAY to move the tabs or "fix" the awesomebar. Nothing to see here, move along.
Or, you know, try 30 seconds of Google-Fu and get your own damn answers.
So far FF4 has been great. I've moved back from Chrome. Only hiccup was the DirectDraw fonts under Vista but it was easily solved.
I realized you can't do private browsing AND normal browsing in two separate windows or tabs... Please tell me I over looked something.
Most of their articles are crap so they go for the cheap hits.
I'm sorry, but seriously who wants to run excel or word or various other applications inside there browser?
I know why companies want us to this, it gets rid of the annoying customers who think they own the software they buy and allows them to simply rent it to there customers.
Yes. Right click on the '+' by the tabs. Deselect "Tabs on Top" and it should be back to normal.
Ed Bott says that IE will outlast FireFox Ed Bott says that apps can replace extensions. He has no clue what he is talking about, he's a paid MicroSoft troll spouting FUD and he's not very good at it.
Heck, there are three major browsers, two mid-majors, and numerous niche browsers (my grouping, yours may vary, that's not the point). If Opera still has users and is still putting out updates, I don't think the others are going to go away. IE would not in all likelihood be anywhere even *close* to standards-compliant if they didn't face the competition of FF/Chrome/et. al. They certainly have taken notes from the competition on what a modern browser should be like.
I have five browsers installed, and I would believe many of you have more than two yourselves. Each has something to offer that the others don't, or at least delivers something in a way that I prefer. Just MHO, but I think there are enough enthusiasts/hobbyists in the world to keep the pre-installed browsers from displacing the others. I know I'll continue to use them all, to encourage each company to strive for innovations and improvements.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Yeah, right. I'm sure the vast majority of people downloading torrents have no clue what Firefox is and go about using IE6 all day. Clearly, the best way to target IE users is to target people downloading torrents. Brilliant idea.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Firefox is currently at about 42% among web developers visiting w3schools.com
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Yet? There always was, and it's 2 mouse clicks away. Right click almost anywhere on any toolbar and uncheck tabs on top.
And honestly, I don't understand what all the hate about tabs on top is about. It saves real estate by moving the tabs to the otherwise unused titlebar, and it actually does more accurately communicate what the URL bar refers to if you think about it (with tabs on bottom, the URL bar is logically attached to the current tab but visually is not). If you go back and watch some of the videos the FF team put out when they were still debating this decision I think you'll see that they put quite a lot of thought into it. At the very least you'll realize that they knew some percentage of users were going to hate it so they made it easy to roll back to the old layout.
Or, you can go to other sites that have different statistics and don't forget user-agents. Much like Exchange vs. Notes or CPU MHz, browser usage numbers are no longer relevant or interesting except to those advancing an agenda.
Right click on any toolbar; read context menu items; click "put my tabs just where they were".
Mostly harmless.
Right-click on the tabs, un-check "Tabs on Top".
To move the buttons around, right-click on any button and click "customize". Drag them around to your heart's content.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
It's FF v Chrome. IE isn't going away - at least not while Windows is a viable option. However, FF's position as #2 was in part due to the resources Google pumped into Mozilla.. and I think it's reasonable to say Google is less motivated these days. Moreover, for the same reason IE is entrenched, so it WebKit - the 3 major mobile platforms + all new tablets + 2 major desktop browsers. Mozilla is riding its past successes, but it's saving grace is its "addons".. and WebKit is catching up there. Some FF addons are hideous.. when I use Firebug, much of which is baked into IE and Chrome, it kills my FF experience after a few hours. Plus I have to restart my browser to disable it. (Not FF fault necessarily, other than the fact that I even need the addon to get what others provide natively) Add to that the fact that Chrome has the 2 biggest plugins baked in (PDF, Flash). Recently I set up some older computers, fresh installs of XP: performance has changed enough over the years that I changed my setup behavior, and now I put Chrome on all new machines. This is the future: IE and Chrome.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
He also works IT and sometimes browses using the "Private Browsing Mode" because of tracking cookies, etc, etc he just can't stand.
Chrome under Windows and Linux will allow you to open an Incognito window while your regular window full of tabs is also open.. as will Opera.
But firefox for some reason won't allow you. If you hit "Start private browsing" or whatever, it gives you a choice to either stick with the open window OR open your private browsing window which closes the other regular window... Yes it saves the tabs so they open back up *after* you close the private browsing mode window, but why in the world can't you have both open at the same time like the other browsers?!
With your nick, you may also be interested to know that Pentadactyl is working just fine with Firefox 4, and will help you not see those weird new forward/reverse buttons ever again.
from TFA:
"Like Google, Mozilla is going to use four channels for development"
don't they mean "like debian's four branches (experimental, SID, testing, stable) ?
What ? Me, worry ?
Maybe the problem there is that the titlebar does have a use if you want to move the entire browser window about. In which case, its not unused, its a minefield of tabs to click on :)
Menu's are good, they provide a very consistent user interface to control an app. When you get rid of them, you end up in territory that can best be described as 'useless' - re the Microsoft Office 'orb'.
For those of you who don't like the tiny formatting of the "linkover" box that appears when you point at a link, you can format it in your userChrome.css like thus:
/* linkover */
.statuspanel-label {
font-size: 20pt !important;
color: brown !important;
background: InfoBackground !important;
max-width: 100% !important;
}
statuspanel[type=overLink] {
max-width: 100% !important;
}
Small tab GUI improvements theoretically help, but there's zero improvement on the bottom of the barrel side of non-geeks. People past their fourties who want to go from Zero to Facebook in 6.3 seconds with absolutely no prior computer experience. They just do NOT care to learn and eyes glaze over when anything but 'my stuff!' gets mentioned.
The worst part is you can't force learning on these proverbial babies too blind to even know they can't direct their own steps away from their teachers. Even overlapping and minimized windows are a challenge day after day for people teaching them. That is after I've explained Window buttons to them two or three times.
It's as futile as explaining HD resolutions to someone who doesn't care because the big game is on RIGHT NOW and they only call you if they find a problem. I try to get people to not pin their eyes on one window or tab, and put them through numerous "see Yahoo here? see facebook there? see google? go to one, now the other, now the last... good! now do it again" But they don't know how tabs get there, and the difference between tabs and even their 'Back' button. There's always an endless set of things that can happen while you are instructing these people that requires I just go back to DOS --yes, DOS, and show them why simple GUI ideas must be learnt and understood before going on a web browser.
It's pretty ridiculous - they guarantee success by publishing fact-light crap. The more outrageous and/or preposterous their content, the more people will link to them, the more hits they get, the more money they get. I mean, do you seriously think this guy believes what he wrote? Or is it more likely that he laughed as he wrote it, thinking of what kind of comments his article is going to get?
I still dislike Firefox for failing to implement h.264. Did they resolve that so that you can at least use your OS support for it? I would imagine that Firefox will be swallowed up by Chrome if nothing else, and if Chrome fails to support h.264 they are also taking a risk of losing user base.
explains damn near every sports writer- Jason Whitlock being the primary example.
You do know that the images are already compressed, right?
Ever tried to gzip a jpeg file and see what kind of compression ratio you get? And 56k modems do compression in their protocal as well. I don't think you are seeing much benifit from additional image compression in the browser.
This is your ISP forcing you to do this? Who is your ISP? Bob's Corporate Redudancy Corporation of Corporate Redundancy, LLC?
IMO that sort of mix would be pretty healthy. Safer than any one with a big advantage (that one would be able to cause the sort of hassle that IE6 has caused) or there only being two major players (with three, one can go through bad spot, including dying completely, without necessarily creating a situation where one of the others ends up with 60%+ market share).
Regarding your dialup provider: assuming you are dial-up due simply to nothing else being available in your area (rather than for cost reasons) and you have a few $/month spare you could rent a cheap VPS somewhere, install your own proxy software like http://ziproxy.sourceforge.net/, and use that instead of the ISP's setup. That should do image recompression in a way that is not browser specific, apply compression to textual content (html, css, scripts) that doesn't have it already, and so on. If your ISP does something to make this impossible (perhaps their proxy is transparent and so difficult to avoid) you might need to setup a VPN between you and your proxy (using OpenVPN, or perhaps just a SSH tunnel) to work around such limitations.
I have switched browsers a number of times.
I switched from IE to Firefox which was a major change. Firefox was faster and supported things like plugins well.
For a long time all was well and I stuck to Firefox and found many plugins I would say I can't live without. So when Chrome entered the market I tried it and I had to admit it was damn fast faster then IE and Firefox but at the time it lacked support for plugins.
When Chrome finally added proper plugin support and Adblock was released for it I decided to give it another go. Chrome was still a whole lot faster then Firefox both in page loading but especially in starting/opening tabs/closing etc was so much faster.
Now Firefox 4 was released and I gave it another try but there is no big difference between it and Chrome. Its not really faster or slower then Chrome it has no real features that Chrome doesn't have.
Why should I move to Firefox?
What a boring article from this Ed guy. All speculation and trying to create controversy. Microsoft has much to prove and to do since IE6 and their crappy interpretation of HTML until now. IE9 needs to be quite good to regain followers aside from those who buy laptop with windows pre-installed and use it because they couldn't care less about computers or internet.
Not too impressed with Firefox 4.
There goes any productivity I might have had today.... :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
>>>You do know that the images are already compressed, right?
Netscape's dialup ISP *re*compresses the images, decreasing them to about one-half their original size (good quality) or 1/10th their original size (terrible quality). Of course they look like crap but I prefer speed over beauty.
It does the same with GIFs, Flash, and Text (as small as 1% original size).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
So far I'm liking FF4. Everything seems to work well. I'm getting used to the little popup preview of links in the bottom right corner. The sync functionality looks cool and I'm planning to try it out to sync with my Android phone. The only real issue I've encountered is related to the interaction between the Tab Groups feature (aka Panorama) and the Tree Style Tabs plugin, which I consider an absolute necessity anymore.
If I switch to a tab group, and then try to go back to my full display with all tabs shown, the tabs get all scrambled, lose their hierarchical positions, and some seem to disappear completely. I really hope there's a way to fix that, although it'll probably be up to the TST developer to do it. For now I think I'll just have to avoid using Tab Groups.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Not having a stop button would piss me off to no end. What exactly do you do when you come across (for example) a forum post bogged down with 1600x1200 photos weighing 2MB each, and you don't have time for such bullshit? Or do you have time for such bullshit?
"The final release arrives just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of IE9’s public debut. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. IE9 is part of Windows, and its development reflects the same engineering discipline that we saw in Windows 7: Plan, develop, stabilize, ship. Repeat."
"engineering discipline" = M$ ?
"Plan, develop, stabilize, ship."
Copy, do it badly, don't bugtest, get it out the door with lots of marketing hype
Somebody must have sipped from the wrong kool-aid
I think it kind of silly that moz.org folks have caved to the version inflation craze. I find it mind-bogglingly silly that there are folks for whom this matters. I've said it elsewhere, I'll say it again here: to cure all their marketing problems and silence all the naysayers, they should have just rebranded 4.0 as Fïrëföx 11 for its release.
"Is it any better than the stable version of Chrome?" "It's one better."
The main reason I run Firefox as my principal browser is "Bookmark all tabs" which Chromium inexplicably does not have. As a result, I only use Chromium for "throwaway browsing", not web research or anything that might generate links I want to keep.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I'm surprised that nobody typically mentions the fact that Chrome is produced by an insanely profitable company that makes its cash from an effective monopoly on online search. They have hundreds of paid engineers working on Chrome, and it would be an embarrassment if they weren't able to make the kind of progress they have. Mozilla has (I believe) some paid developers, but is still primarily an open source project and has a fraction of the resources of Google (or Microsoft). It amazes me that people beat up Mozilla on its progress compared to products that have huge amounts of money behind them. They also have a huge legacy codebase that they have to deal with it. Progress is always swift when you start the clean-sheet efforts...once you start having to deal with things like backwards compatibility, life begins to suck. Google will quickly get there as well, especially since they have extension support now.
Also, just like Apple with Safari and Microsoft with IE, at some point Google management will declare the battle won and move resources to other projects, and some other browser will become the new hotness. This is all the natural course of events, and I believe competition is good in tech, and all kudos to Chrome for revitalizing the browser space, even if I find some of their "innovations" to be design preferences hailed mostly for being different, not necessarily better.
Maybe you should take a(nother) look at Opera. It has a nice compression service option. It's proxy based, compresses and marginally degrades images, and is otherwise transparent to the user.
I am forced to use IE with my Dialup provider (image compression only works with IE6/7/8), and it stinks. Mostly from the lack of features.
What on earth are you doing having a pagefile on an SSD? You'll use up the writes ridiculously fast that way!
They should just name it Firefox 11.03b
(for March 2011 Beta)
I say it's Beta, because FF3.6 is proven stable. FF"4" isnt yet.
I downloaded and installed it. I note on some sites Firefox simply freezes up for a good couple of minutes and then proceeds to load the page correctly.
It does work with the things I really need but as I said, I don't think it's ready for public consumption yet.
Bah. Just have the shortcut point to firefox.exe. Did that at home. Had an IE skin for a while, but I eventually dropped that. Later dropped the fake shortcut, too. They still use Firefox. :-)
Watch out, here come the car analogies.
Fiat 500 > BMW 335
Ford 500 > Lexus 400
Mazda 626 > MB S550
The Firefox UI is getting worse, IMHO. The Add-ons Manager is particularly unattractive and difficult to use, and the crap is accumulating and/or derivative (e.g., copying the Chrome UI). The InfoQ article explains why, and gives me no hope for the future:
every contributor gets equal say on issues of user interface design
Great; we can go right back to an interface built like the old Mozilla Suite, one of the primary reasons Firefox was created. Isn't that the reason they instituted an interface czar?
I don't know about that considering that IE and Webkit are currently safer than Firefox for all of those running a modern version of Windows (Vista and 7) thanks to the fact that both IE and Webkit support low rights mode and Firefox doesn't. In fact the only way to get Firefox to actually function with lower rights is to disable the security features that makes low rights mode secure in the first place!
Now will I ever go back to IE, or offer it to my customers as a recommendation? Not a chance in hell, after spending years cleaning up the mess that was the abandoned IE6 there is too much bad blood there, and thanks to Webkit I don't have to. But there are millions on modern Windows versions and for ALL of them currently IE is safer than FF by a long shot and if they promote that? I could see many simply sticking with IE rather than switching.
It is just common sense, why would you run the browser at a higher permission level than required? The browser is running unsigned third party code from the wild and wooly web, the lower the rights it has the better. Why Mozilla can't manage to add support after 4 years is just ridiculous. I'm currently typing this on FF 4 (which looks like a bad Chrome ripoff to me) but without low rights mode and now that the Chrome extensions have all my must haves like ABP and Forecastfox means this will probably be the last time I use FF or hand it to my customers.
It is a shame, as I've been a FF users since the early days, but what good is having a modern OS with enhanced security if the programs that benefit from it don't actually use it? So while I won't be going to IE I will be saying goodbye to FF for Comodo Dragon which gives me all the speed of Chrome and low rights mode without phoning home to Google.
I really had hopes for FF 4, but it seems like they are spending their time aping Chrome instead of simply making FF better. As XP dies out more and more people will be able to use the security features that FF simply doesn't support. What is the point of aping Chrome (such as tabs on top, no file/edit/view, bookmarks on the right corner) if you don't copy the important stuff like the increased security? Feels like cargo cult usability at play to me.
And I'm sure the fanbois will waste their mod points, but it doesn't make 2+2=5 nor will it change reality. You wouldn't run your OS as admin, would you? You agree that least permissions for the task is simply best secvurity practices, yes? Then why would you insist on running a browser that runs at higher permissions and in fact dies hard if you try to run it with less permissions than the user? Seems like a bad design problem to me, maybe that is why Moz still hasn't added it even after 4 years, Gecko is simply not capable of running with lower permissions.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you proposing a trojan that silently installs FF in the background? Yeah, that's going to work out really well for the reputation of FF.
Stupid idea is stupid.
Crikes.
-- BMO
Yeah, we'll call it Windows Update^H^H^H^H^HFirefox Update.
There's no place like
I just downloaded FF4.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Someone else reminded us of the multiprocess tab project. A year ago, we thought FF 3.7 (now 3.6.4 and up) would unveil Electrolysis' "Multiple content processes" but the wiki has been stranded with no clear timeline updates for 9 months since July 2010.
The main FF4 page mentions JS speed increases, but MCP seems nothing other than some difficult bulletpoint under-the-hood that they can't figure out how to market. It feels like when Vista and Seven cheated us out of a new unhierarchycal database filesystem that was promised several years before 2006. What makes me lose hope is that even FF's summary page for 2011 is mum about MCP. Their detailed roadmap does promise Electrolysis and "Process-per-tab to mitigate effects of crashes." I'm more surprised they have a goal of extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists. It also will hopefully tackle the lag to undisplay current tabs and begin to switch to another, especially when some of them have flash loaded.
Besides implementing WebGL (see google body), FF4 doesn't present a substancial under-the-hood improvement for normal 3.6 users, let alone your average home/office drone. I have an idea! Wait till FF5 comes out in 3 short months, and FF6 in 6 months, or FF7 in December. Meanwhile, I have higher chances of test-driving IE9 to see how much it's grown. FF has reached its aimless teen girl phase, and thinks life is nothing but trying new emo makeup every month :)
I'd argue that the environment that IE9 runs on will be gone long before firefox is. There's some paradigm shifts going on with smartphones (I haven't seen IE on Android or Iphones or blackberrys, or any tablets not running windows CE)
And with the stunning (compared to the Kin) amount of windows 7 phones produced, and a screaming new tablet version of Microsoft windows something coming (maybe sometime) in 2012, I can't see how IE won't continue to lose market. Oh and beta chrome 11 with freaking VOICE INPUT is out right now, so it's at least 2 better than IE.
I'm more surprised they have a goal of [...] extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists.
Curse you, /. parser... <50 made you eat my sentences!
I wrote that "they have a goal of [less-than glyph] 50ms GUI responses and that I hoped this would take care of recent problems with Tools / Options taking multiple seconds under windows while parsing extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists."
That is a Windows problem: its anti-spyware programs give themselves permission to stick their hand into FF's innards to "immunize" it the same way they violate IE. Much redundancy ensues because said same software also hostfile blocks the same domains so that lookups fail. The end result is that Firefox wastes its time managing growing blacklists that are already unreachable at the OS/DNS level. This is not Mozilla's fault, though.
Maybe I'm in a minority here, but outside of work (where we all have to use IE due to security settings... although we also use OpenOffice on many low priority boxes, go figure) I know more people who use Safari on a regular basis than IE. Like, lots more.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Firefox 4 is using 10% of 2 CPUs on Windows 7 when just sitting there displaying a completely static page. Firefox 3 went down to near 0 when idle. What's sucking up resources?
IE will win and FF will die... In other new, Microsoft has decided that it will opensource Windows and pay users $499 to install MS Office
I don't think it's a big deal, 'cause the difference between the two is this: 1. Upgrade IE for security reasons (not upgrading results in old bugs & holes being left open) 2. Upgrade Firefox for browsing reasons So of course, lots of IE users will upgrade and FF users will too. Chrome's my main browser. Firefox is my secondary. Opera my thrid ('cause I do web development). I never browse/surf/etc in IE, I just use it for Windows Updates & checking to make sure a website works & looks fine in it.
For many years, Firefox has been the most unstable program in common use. On Windows XP, if Firefox has many open windows and tabs, it will eventually crash both itself and Windows.
Has the instability been fixed?
mark. 12 mil 16 k to be precise actually.
that quadruples ie9. europe should be sleeping at this hour, and yet they are still downloading.
Read radical news here
Silly me, I told Firefox to update today. It did, and then promptly crapped out and would not come back. I tried a manual install and then (and only then) found out it requires newer system libraries. I tried going back to 3.6, but that just hangs. I finally got 3.5 working, which I suppose I'm stuck with now until I decide to upgrade everything. I'm running Fedora 8 which is old, but no worse than RHEL/CentOS.
If they want to get new version fever with system libraries, that's their business I guess, but they could at least say something somewhere about that, and preferably have the browser refuse to do the update and say why.
XP is not going away (in business at least) for while....
and certainly, no one will purchase W7 because IE9 alone.
Live long & prosper FF..........
I for one am going to have to either go back to 3.x or switch over to Chrome. If I have Firefox on my 2nd monitor, which I often do depending on what I'm working on, the menus flip out. They blink momentarily and then disappear. Makes it kind of useless...
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
From: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap#Firefox_5
Not to troll, but it looks like they have not yet an idea on what to ship really... Sounds a lot like a "me too" move...
Firefox 5
TBD ...anything that improves responsiveness and is ready ...anything that improves stability and is ready ...anything that polishes the user interface and is ready ...anything else serving product priorities and is ready
TBD
TBD
Firefox 6
TBD ...anything that improves responsiveness and is ready ...anything that improves stability and is ready ...anything that polishes the user interface and is ready ...anything else serving product priorities and is ready
TBD
TBD
Firefox 7
TBD ...anything that improves responsiveness and is ready ...anything that improves stability and is ready ...anything that polishes the user interface and is ready ...anything else serving product priorities and is ready
TBD
TBD
You don't get it. There will be "major" or "minor" versions any more, simply versions. That's what Chrome does, and in a project that changes organically rather than in a jumpy way, it makes much more sense.
And by the way, the only thing that's wrong about Firefox 40 (or 3,142) is that you're not used to it.
Ok FF is ok but it slow down when you install a lot of addons. In K-Meleon this shortcoming doesn't exist.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
I was delighted by the glow.mozilla.org site. However two conflicting observations are puzzling me and make me wonder what role politics will play in the battle of the giant browsers:
On the one hand, in the Mozilla country breakdown list they attempt to list FYROM properly under its UN official name as "Macedonia, F.Y.R. of" (unlike e.g. C.I.A. Internet Usage Reports, Internetworldstats.com, BBC.co.uk etc. who just list "Macedonia").
On the other, Cyprus is totally absent in their country list, although as I write I see actually can see download hits on the map from there. Makes me wonder: is it because Mozilla couldn't decide on which continent to situate Cyprus, is it because they can't decide whether it belongs to Turkey or not, or is it because it is divided in two parts recognised by two countries and they didn't want to get in the middle?
If there are any Cypriots here, I'd like to hear their comments!
I always thought that MSI stood for "Microsoft's Stupid Installer".
Yes, it is slightly more complex than the Nullsoft installer that I remember a lot of Windows programs shipping with, but I was always partial to a little llama action.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
...without phoning home to Google
Before now I had never heard of Comodo Dragon; I also believed that there were no more issues with Google / privacy in regard to Chrome. I can't find a reference to Chrome being sneaky- Before I switch to Comodo, what's up with Chrome phoning home?
I've been a long time fan of Firefox becuase I love the add-ons. If there was any way I wanted my Firefox customized, there was an add-on for that (like the Apple ads). However, I have recently been noticing that Firefox has CRAZY memory leaks. I was very disappointed to learn that they did not fix that in FF4. I still had it running at 400 MB at one point! Right now, I'm using.... IE8.
All of your searches are sent home to Google, from what I understand pretty much everything you do is sent straight back to Google for data mining. If you type in "Google Chrome Privacy Issues" into any search you'll find more, but here is a link to get you started.
Now I've checked Comodo with both the software and hardware firewall and NOTHING is being sent to Comodo except for a single version number at launch, which Comodo uses to tell you if you are out of date. On top of that you can choose to use the extra security features offered free by Comodo, such as their secure DNS which will blackhole known malware drivebys and their faster updating certs which helps to catch bad certs before they can be used against you. They also stick with the stable branch of Chromium so while you aren't bleeding edge, at least you aren't...well bleeding edge with all the bugs that go with it.
So give it a try, like their other free products it is rock solid and runs great. Ever since tripping over their free AV I've made it a point to try any new freeware they release and they've not released a single clunker yet. They really put some thought and do a lot of work on their freeware. So give it a spin, but remember the Google updater with the phone home often won't be uninstalled when you uninstall Chrome and will thus have to be removed manually.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You're right. Had no idea- Thanks.