Firefox 4, A Day Later

Re:Interesting idea by bmo · 2011-03-23 03:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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BMO

Jesus Flipping Christ... by netsharc · 2011-03-23 03:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

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!

Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by SuperKendall · 2011-03-23 03:48 · Score: 4, Funny

We should blow his mind and claim the true Firefox version number is divided by ten for display so it doesn't harm monitors.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by characterZer0 · 2011-03-23 03:50 · Score: 3, Insightful

How the FFFFFFFFFUUUUUU- does a moron like this get hired to write a tech column?
He writes articles with inflammatory headlines and gets clicks. He gets it into clueless middle managers' heads that IE is better than Firefox. There are people who will pay well for both of those things.

--
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by balbus000 · 2011-03-23 04:19 · Score: 5, Funny

According to their roadmap, Firefox will be up to version 7 by the end of 2011.
They say that they want to "ship our new technology to users in smaller bundles, more frequently" but personally, I just think they want more cake.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by LordLimecat · 2011-03-23 04:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

He does however have a point that in the last 3 years chrome went from a brand new, buggy, crashy browser to what is generally regarded as the measuring stick for speed. Its gone from no extension support to support that rivals firefox's (auto-update, GPO deployment, permissions ala andriod). It already has process seperation, plugin separation, and extension process separation. And it appears to have set the standard for browser UI for many of the major browsers. It really is quite impressive how quickly it has matured. Even more impressive is that they now fully support the thing for Active Directory deployments, with both an MSI installer and GPO templates for fully configuring and locking down chrome (including the ability to turn off tracking).
Firefox is great, and I like to use it still; but they HAVE taken some 8 years and STILL no official MSIs, or AD templates. Since chrome fits my needs so well, and Internet Explorer no longer SO awful that i feel obligated to offer a replacement to users, it doesnt seem quite as attractive as it used to be.
Perhaps moving to this new model will help them speed up development and incremental release of features; shipping a lot of versions does mean that you get your product out quicker, and so long as QA is maintained, that can be a good thing. Chrome's model has meant that when they were at version 3, and folks said "but what about extensions", they could have version 4 out with extensions in 3 months; and when folks said "what about adblock functionality", they could add that very quickly.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by Nerdfest · 2011-03-23 04:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

Those of us that are forced to work with the 'official corporate browser, IE' are the ones that end up paying for this.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by stewbacca · 2011-03-23 04:44 · Score: 2

Every time I change something in my code, I up the version number by one! That must mean my browser is awesome, right?
That guy is a serious shill. He asks what IE's greatest challenge is then answers it incorrectly. IE's greatest challenge is it's a piece of crap. It's slow, unresponsive, buggy and non-standard.
I'll use ANY browser (other than IE) because I frankly don't care about all the bells and whistles and don't have a favorite. But if you give me a browser that is so obviously slower (the fact you can actually perceive IE's slowness compared to the others says volumes) and buggier than the other options, I'll refuse to use it.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by gbjbaanb · 2011-03-23 04:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

no, he; actually says "Firefox took 2 years to go from version 3.5 to version 4", whereas Microsoft managed to put out a beta and a release candidate in that time - go microsoft devs!
I suppose he completely forgot about Firefox 3.6 while he was kissing Ballmer's shiny bum, and the 12 (?) beta releases that FF put out, or the 2 release candidates.
Not that I consider a beta or a RC a proper release - they're 'toys' for the early adopters to play with, but regardless of that, you cannot be considered a serious journalist if you don't compare the same way.
Incidentally, I can say that IE9 will not get a foothold too much - we've just had an email sent out from corporate IT saying "don't install it, it breaks all our lovely enterprise apps". So I could install it, but then I wouldn't be able to fill in my timesheet (I know, the pain) so I guess I'd better do as they say and continue all my usual surfing using FF4. I know my salesman has converted to Chrome and he barely knows what the internet is so I can't say IE9's future is as cheerleader-bright as he thinks it is.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by pclminion · 2011-03-23 04:55 · Score: 4, Funny

Well, everyone knows that version numbers are a measurement of how many featuritons are included in the product. A featuriton is a fundamental subatomic particle which represents the basic unit of innovation. For every version number, an additional 3.82e26 featuritons is included in the product. So really, the version number is just measuring the total featuriton level and comparing version numbers is a completely valid way to compare the development of two products.
Let's not bother getting into the quantum developodynamics of it, just take my word for it.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by VortexCortex · 2011-03-23 05:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

So, you're saying that the Google funded, closed source, web browser "Chrome" is capable of quickly catching up to the features that the free donation & ads supported Firefox took so long to develop.
Basically you're saying: more money and developers == Faster Development. Thanks for your input Mr. Obvious.
P.S. Yeah, that's right: I said, "Chrome is closed source". Chromium is open source, and Chrome may or may not be a direct derivative of the open source Chromium. Needless to say, Google adds their own proprietary bits to Chromium before they ship it as Chrome, ergo: Chrome = Close Source.
Don't get me wrong, I like Chromium. Chrome is a joke -- Why anyone would want to use the closed / proprietary version (with Google's late-night secret sauce added), when there's a clean open source version available is beyond me.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by paulej72 · 2011-03-23 05:40 · Score: 2

And don't forget that Google built on WebKit, which Apple had already made many advancements in by the time Google decided to use it.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by netsharc · 2011-03-23 05:56 · Score: 2

Actually, the sad forgotten child that is Opera is already at 11.01. Poor Norwegians, but hey, I'm typing this using that very browser. As one great feature, it lets me put the tabs on the right side of the screen, Chrom(e,ium) only allows vertical tabs on the left...

--
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by DigiShaman · 2011-03-23 06:52 · Score: 2

I'm guessing you've never tried IE9 nor plan too. Which is quite sad because finally, MS released a browser that's standards compliant, snappy, and GPU accelerated.

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Life is not for the lazy.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by Skuto · 2011-03-23 06:58 · Score: 4, Informative

Why is the non-profit Mozilla Corp not spending that money to hire developers to add new features to their browser?
Just look at their jobs page...
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by jez9999 · 2011-03-23 07:04 · Score: 3, Insightful

Actually, I don't like this new tactic of a major version number increment every 3 months or so. I think it was helpful to think of the major version number as a really big, API-breaking change that didn't happen very often, with minor version numbers representing significant but not too major evolutions of functionality.
This new scheme means we'll have Firefox 40 by about 2020. I predict that somewhere before that, they'll either stop the major version increments, or drop the emphasis on major version number altogether and just call it 'Firefox'.

--
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · 2011-03-23 07:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

I won't duplicate the other comments about Chrome being run by a huge, well resourced company. But it is!

However, it is worth stressing that Chrome had the advantage of no prior baggage, and the benefit of hindsight. So the architecture of Chrome was built from the ground up to resolve issues that afflicted other browsers including Firefox, and at the same time, did not have to be compatible with existing add-ons/extensions. Mozilla presumably have a tougher time resolving existing issues, whilst maintaining compatibility with a *huge* number of add-ons. If they did massively break compatibility, they'd be kissing goodbye to one of the main advantages to Firefox.

and STILL no official MSIs, or AD templates
^ this
Sometimes I'm not sure Mozilla are really helping themselves though! It strikes me that this would be relatively easy to resolve, so I'm not sure what's gone wrong with the Mozilla world domination team.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by TheRealGrogan · 2011-03-23 08:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ed Bott is just a pro-Microsoft troll (usually... though he has done a few good pieces). His job is to piss people off, and generate visitor sessions for ZDNet.
Any "Microsoft App Platform" will be for Windows. Microsoft's definition of targetting code for multiple platforms means multiple versions of Windows. XP, Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit etc.
Funny how their crap doesn't catch on like it used to. For example, they have resorted to forcing Silverlight on people's computers. If you want MSN Messenger, or anything in the Live Essentials suite you get Silverlight. I have yet to see any content I couldn't view for lack of having silverlight. (That doesn't mean there isn't, just that I haven't encountered it. It's really not that popular). No sane developer is going to put their money on that, and risk alienating visitors. There's a reason that Flash is the most widely used technology today and that is because there's a good chance that most all of your visitors have a Flash plugin available. It's the closest thing to multi platform there is, for media content. Flash Player Square allows pure 64 bit browsers to participate too now. .Net Framework is rubbish. Fragile, hardware intensive rubbish (They work around that now by having services that run all the time to pre-compile byte code) that produces apps chock full of GUI annoyances. Many computers need to have multiple implementations of it too. 1.1, 3.5 (which covers 2.x) and now 4.
So I think we'll be seeing Firefox survive Internet Explorer 9, or Chrome, or Opera regardless of what nonsense Ed Fucking Bott extrudes from his flabby rectum. With a more level playing field in this day and age, it will remain a viable choice.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by rrohbeck · 2011-03-23 08:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

That sounds great! Where can I download the Linux version?

--
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... by pclminion · 2011-03-23 08:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

Why anyone would want to use the closed / proprietary version (with Google's late-night secret sauce added), when there's a clean open source version available is beyond me.
By the Chromium team's own admission, there is no such thing as a "stable release" of Chromium. And they don't seem interested in making it so. Basically, you download top-of-tree and build it. Sorry, I don't use stuff like that for daily work.
When I download software, open source or not, I tend to want it in binary form. At least then I have a hope in hell that maybe the thing has been tested somewhat. Open source developers are way too squishy with this kind of thing. "The latest stable is 1.2.3, go get it and build." Uh, no. The latest stable is some particular binary that YOU built and YOU tested and YOU found to be adequate. My compiler might (very well may be) different. My dependencies may be different. My system is certainly different. This is not the definition of "testing" or "stable." Build a binary, test it on a variety of environments, bless it, and put it out there. You CAN be open source and professional at the same time.

Animated UI icons by Paul+Townend · 2011-03-23 03:43 · Score: 2

So one of the major thinsg to expect in FF5 is "UI animation"?
For some reason, this makes me feel kind of sad....

App ecosystem! by sakdoctor · 2011-03-23 03:43 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:App ecosystem! by somersault · 2011-03-23 03:48 · Score: 2

I have a brilliant idea - rename the "extensions" tab to "apps". Sorted!

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which is totally what she said
Re:App ecosystem! by andrea.sartori · 2011-03-23 03:52 · Score: 2

Apple would sue in microseconds.

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Mostly harmless.
Re:App ecosystem! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-03-23 04:01 · Score: 4, Informative

The author appears to be a die-hard MS fan with a lot of his history invested in MS products so it is unsurprising that he would write a pro-IE article.
Ref:
Personal website "Microsoft Expertise" - http://www.edbott.com/weblog/
Profile on MS: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/meetexperts/bott.mspx
Re:App ecosystem! by speculatrix · 2011-03-23 05:26 · Score: 2

how about "appl" ? :-D

Re:To play devils advocate by Compholio · 2011-03-23 03:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

People keep saying this, but I just loaded the new Firefox and it feels to me like the interface is much more responsive and flash-intensive pages that used to take forever to load now show up extremely rapidly. I was sticking with FF3 because of the great plugins, but FF4 actually seems to be pretty decent out of the box.

Re:Interesting idea by DrXym · 2011-03-23 03:49 · Score: 2

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.

You just wait by SethThresher · 2011-03-23 03:50 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:You just wait by HermMunster · 2011-03-23 04:29 · Score: 2

I see little to no activity in Africa, Australia, Central South America, the Middle East. Japan, and parts of Asia thereabouts has a seemingly slow take up. The mid-west in the US is also slow, particularly around Montana, North and South Dakota, and northern Texas.
If you are a resident in one of those areas maybe you should try to wake your neighbors to the idea of FF.

--
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Re:You just wait by BZ · 2011-03-23 04:40 · Score: 2

Africa for the most part has no internet connections.
Japan and Australia are in the middle of the night right now. As of when you posted your comment, it's 1:39am in Tokyo and 3:39am in Sydney. There was quite a bit of downloading going on in Japan 10 hours ago or so.
Re:You just wait by BZ · 2011-03-23 06:58 · Score: 2

The stats show 108,749 downloads to date for Australia. The population of Australia is about 22.5 million according to . So figure one in 200 people has downloaded in Australia.
The same states show 2 million downloads for the US, with a population of about 300 million people; one in 150 has downloaded.
This is over one Australian day and 1.5 nights, and 1.5 US days and one night.
Seems like pretty similar download rates to me.
I suspect people seriously overestimate how many people live in Australia. For comparison, the population of the Netherlands is 16 million, and that of Belgium is 10 million, so between them they have almost 20% more people than Australia does.
Now Japan, I agree; there are 339,157 downloads for a population of 130 million or so. That's about half the US rate.
Re:You just wait by UBfusion · 2011-03-23 21:24 · Score: 2

I was and still am mesmerised by it too. When I first saw it, it stroke me as an epiphany, for several reasons:
First, you get a concrete perception of the "global village": every minute, thousands of people on the globe download it, and you actually see it in real time. It's not the same thing as e.g. Panoramio on google maps, where you just see that somebody, sometime went somewhere and took a picture. It happens as you see it.
Second, the demonstration of the law of large numbers: Despite night and day differences, despite continent separation, despite the wild variation of locations (North, South, East, West, mainland and small islands), you get to see in the histogram that the rate of downloads is approximately constant. Yesterday it was about 50 dls/sec and as I write it's about 100 dls/sec.
Third, it makes you wonder where it all will settle. I tried to find current stats on the total number of FF users, and it must be above 270 million (which was the 2010 figure). If we plot the total FF4 downloads vs time, we should see a nice sigmoid curve.

Re:To play devils advocate by Captain+Splendid · 2011-03-23 03:53 · Score: 2

Yeah, no. As someone who runs FF everywhere, the recent speed increase and extra snappiness is real useful on my lower end machines.

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Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!

Re:Interesting idea by cpu6502 · 2011-03-23 03:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

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"

What blog was that again? by Kynde · 2011-03-23 03:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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

awsome. by acomj · 2011-03-23 03:59 · Score: 2

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.

Re:awsome. by techwrench · 2011-03-23 05:10 · Score: 2

OMGubuntu commenter have stated that it will not be available for 10.04 and 10.10 versions officially. It is scheduled to be in the repositories for 11.x.

--
It's You and I against the World... When do we attack?
Re:awsome. by BZ · 2011-03-23 07:17 · Score: 2

Yeah, I was afraid of that.
On Linux, Chrome does almost all of its painting itself, in software. Firefox, on the other hand, tries to play nice and hand of painting to the X server, using XRender.
Sometimes this works really well, XRender is able to hand the painting off to the graphics card, and you get performance comparable to what you see with IE9/Fx4 on Windows.
But sometimes the graphics driver decides to do the work in software anyway. And they tend to have pretty slow software fallback paths; much slower than Chrome's software renderer.
It sounds like you're hitting one of those situations.
Using a different video driver may help. But the only options for Firefox here are to either do what Chrome does and do it all in software (slower for some people, faster for others), hope driver manufacturers get their act together, or stop using XRender (and try to do everything in GL, say). At the moment that third plan is being followed, but it'll take some work to get there.
Re:awsome. by grcumb · 2011-03-23 11:23 · Score: 2

I love it when a pacific island lights up.
Sorry, that was me. I've been upgrading some of the desktops at the University of the South Pacific campus here in Vanuatu.

--
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.

Re:Apples to Oranges? by Merk42 · 2011-03-23 04:02 · Score: 4, Informative

Nope, the IE9 release candidate was February 10th, the IE9 release version was March 14th, a little over a week before Firefox 4's release version.

Re:Why do we have to bring up IE9 by Shados · 2011-03-23 04:03 · Score: 2

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 :).

Chrome is starting to go that way too. Its beggining to have the corporate features IE was so popular by sysadmins for, and a Google Apps subscription now doubles as a support contract for Chrome in the enterprise. So sysadmins can control deployments, can use domain policies, etc, with Chrome.

Bonus points: Chrome supports windows auth out of the box (Firefox does too with a tweak in the about:config I guess)

Re:Meanwhile, in ExtensionLand... by vlm · 2011-03-23 04:10 · Score: 4, Informative

I just want to make sure ... firebug ... well-tested and confirmed working before I make the jump.

Don't know about "well-tested" (well tested like "a two year Debian release cycle" ?) but I can certainly confirm firebug is working or at least it hasn't failed yet.

Also working:

Adblock plus
flashblock
ghostery
noscript
xmarks

Not working:

Remove it permanently (I can survive without it, but its nice)
Microsoft .net framework assistant 1.2.1 (WTF is this anyway?)

Immediately upon installation:
Right click on that wee little down triangle in the address bar. Uncheck "Tabs on Top" then breathe a sigh of relief as your eyes stop bleeding. Then de-turd the toolbar by right click on the same triangle and select "Customize..." and then rip out the search bar (useless), the home button (so 1993), the stop button (again, so 1993), rearrange the refresh/reload button where god intended it to be, ditto the spinner. Basically just clean it up a bit. Should have come preconfigured this way.

I don't like the weird new forward / reverse buttons. I have muscle memory from FF3 to move back to the start of history in a tab, which no longer seems to work, epic UI fail to screw the user that way. That's the only UI problem I haven't been able to work around yet.

So with about five minutes of amount of work, upgrade results in only two dead (admittedly useless) addons, and one UI fail that'll only strike me about 50 times a day no big deal. I've seen worse dot-zero releases.

I have a clunky many years old desktop and on both FF3 and FF4 everything comes up in "blink of eye" speed, I don't even know how to test if its slower or faster because everywhere I go is faster than my visual cognition (and thats fast, I'm a very fast reader). Its hardly orders of magnitude different, anyway.

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger

IE will survive, while firefox will die. by Seumas · 2011-03-23 04:15 · Score: 2

I'm pretty sure that MSIE is only available for one of the four operating systems I use every day.

What Ed Bott doesn't understand is amazing by erroneus · 2011-03-23 04:18 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:To play devils advocate by GooberToo · 2011-03-23 04:19 · Score: 5, Informative

Same here. The performance difference for me is huge. Its so big, its instantly obvious from the second it starts, which even includes a much faster start for all my tabs. Its instantly snappy and I'm an extremely heavy tab user too. Flash sites are slightly more responsive and now I'm even running greasemonkey (didn't before) which should further slow things. And yet, things are definitely faster. I'm even observing a reduce memory footprint, which I didn't expect, of roughly 200M for the same tabs. I'm extremely impressed. Version 4.0, by far, exceeds my expectations.

As for plugins and add-ons, everything I use is already available for 4.0 so I'm pretty pleased. The only gotcha I've run into is the default linux release is 32-bit and you have to dig to find the 64-bit download. If any cares, you download the 64-bit linux release here.

Oh ya, am observing an extremely annoying issue with 4.0 and slashdot in that entry fields get pushed past the bottom of the screen when making posts, with the new slashdot interface abomination, truly a pain in the ass. Yet another reason to continue to use the old interface. Works great with the old interface. New interface is broken with 4.0.

Re:"When Can I Use?" rating by madmark1 · 2011-03-23 04:19 · Score: 2

I wonder why then Google now tops Apple in WebKit commits?

WebKit commit numbers

Hint: the green line is Google, the blue is Apple.

IE will survive, while firefox will die by VincenzoRomano · 2011-03-23 04:20 · Score: 2

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]

What a waste by DragonHawk · 2011-03-23 04:22 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:To play devils advocate by Compholio · 2011-03-23 04:27 · Score: 2

The only gotcha I've run into is the default linux release is 32-bit and you have to dig to find the 64-bit download. If any cares, you download the 64-bit linux release here. [mozilla.org]

If you're running Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 there's a PPA (for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions):
Firefox 4 PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 users

Re:Worth upgrading? by Zedrick · 2011-03-23 04:33 · Score: 2

Oldbar has never worked for me, think I read somewhere that it conflicts with some other addon I use.

> enjoy having the ability to pull up a page even if the URL > doesn't begin in www

Sorry, what? What does the www subdomain have to do with anything? I never type it in unless there's some site with no content on the sld. My problem is that if I for example type "forum", then I expect to get forum.paradoxplaza.com as first suggestion, since that site is the forum*-site I usually visit. Instead I get all kinds of other blahblaforumblah.com-suggestions, even for sites I haven't visited in several years.

And there's nothing wrong with my memory, I don't forget the URL of the sites I frequent (but I can understand that it might be useful for people suffering from dementia or something).

Re:Interesting idea by amicusNYCL · 2011-03-23 04:36 · Score: 2

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

Re:Interesting idea by amicusNYCL · 2011-03-23 04:38 · Score: 2

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

Re:Is this a riddle? by bunratty · 2011-03-23 04:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

All the other browsers run on Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system. Not IE 9. IE 9 scores worst on the HTML 5 tests compared to other browsers. IE 9 comes dead last compared to speed and memory use against other browsers. You'll have to point me out to where they're catching up with the other browsers.

--
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.

Re:Just rename it! by NotNormallyNormal · 2011-03-23 04:50 · Score: 2

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.

Our University recently e-mailed out to all students and employees to NOT download IE9 as none of the blackboarding, registration, payroll and admin, etc software works in IE9.

That was good for a laugh!

Don't forget Pentadactyl by Chemisor · 2011-03-23 04:52 · Score: 2

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.

Re:I actually really like IE9 by cavreader · 2011-03-23 05:03 · Score: 2

OS integration enables IE9 to take advantage of the advances in their OS and new hardware and provide a level of optimization that is hard to come by if you have to target several different types of OS's. If your company creates their own OS why would you not want to make sure their browser product takes full advantage of the OS capabilities for puposese of performance and safety. They have purposely sacrificed backwards capatibility to do this instead of trying to only include only the browser enhancements that could be supported on their older OS's and older hardware. They have isolated and sandboxed the browser processes sufficiently to protect the underlying OS. To each his own when picking a browser but all of the existing browsers do a pretty good job for the vast majority of users. Using abstract level tech implementation differences to declare one product superior to another is sort of shortsighted. Besides I have always noticed it is the websites I visit that determine the browser performance and not the browser itself.

Re:Fx4 vs Minefield? by BZ · 2011-03-23 05:10 · Score: 2

You're using testing builds. Nothing wrong with that, but they don't guarantee the same stability that the release does. On the other hand, you get new features sooner. Some of us like that. ;)

Re:Is this a riddle? by Just+Some+Guy · 2011-03-23 05:19 · Score: 2

You'll have to point me out to where they're catching up with the other browsers.

IE9 is catching up, in the sense that it's vastly better than previous versions of IE. It's not close to the alternatives, in my opinion, but it's a whole lot closer than it had been.

Now please excuse me while I go tack a shower for having written that.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?

Re:Is this a riddle? by amicusNYCL · 2011-03-23 05:28 · Score: 2

You'll have to point me out to where they're catching up with the other browsers.

How about any test where they include the 32-bit version of IE9 instead of only 64-bit? Like this one.

Some relevant quotes from the conclusion:

OK, so what conclusions can we draw? Well, let’s begin with the obvious and say that Internet Explorer 9 64-bit is an absolute dog when it comes to JavaScript performance. This is to be expected given that IE 9 64-bit is using an older, slower JavaScript engine, while IE 9 32-bit was using the newer, more efficient Chakra JIT. ...

So, what’s the conclusion? Simple, IE9 64-bit is shockingly bad, and all the other browsers are, on the whole, pretty evenly matched.

Of course IE still has work to do with regard to things like HTML 5, as do all browsers, but it's pretty disingenuous to claim that they aren't catching up, or that they haven't already caught up in various respects. Look at the HTML 5 support tables, for example, to see how HTML 5 support in previous versions and current versions compare, and how each vendor has been increasing support. IE has increased there more than some. It's no surprise that Chrome focuses on HTML 5 support due to the fact that it's built by an internet services company.

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"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black

Re:No reason to switch. by Ash-Fox · 2011-03-23 05:46 · Score: 2

Why should I move to Firefox?

My overall reasons for choosing Firefox over Chrome is the lower memory usage (I don't use stuff like adblock which chews a ton of memory), and sites generally are more likely to work for me in Firefox.

Examples of sites that don't work with Chrome but do in Firefox (either by some functions being broken or not working at all) in my experience: Zimbra's administration panel, Citibank poland, HSBC UK, Monster, Desert Sun Classifieds and others that I can't recall off the top of my head.

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Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.

Re:Oh Thanks by Phrogman · 2011-03-23 06:00 · Score: 2

There goes any productivity I might have had today.... :P

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"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid

Re:Uglier than Firefox 3. by discord5 · 2011-03-23 06:01 · Score: 2

Requires an OS reboot, even on Windows 7, for installation.

I didn't have to reboot. It just installed without a hitch for me.

"Block images from this site" has disappeared as a right-click option.

Didn't even notice, with adblockplus and all that.

Re:Fonts by VGPowerlord · 2011-03-23 06:01 · Score: 2

I'm using an nVidia GT 240 connected to a BenQ T241W LCD running in its native resolution of 1920x1200 via HDMI on Windows 7 Ultimate, with graphics drivers updated earlier this month and I'm seeing the font issue as described by the previous poster.

Some letters look randomly bolded. Some letters look randomly thinned.

I believe I've done ClearType tuning already.

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GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011

Re:I actually really like IE9 by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-03-23 06:11 · Score: 2

IE is no more integrated into Windows than Safari is into OS X.

So far so good.... mostly by Danse · 2011-03-23 06:26 · Score: 2

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.

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It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer

Re:Meanwhile, in ExtensionLand... by StuartHankins · 2011-03-23 06:31 · Score: 2

Right-clicking on the arrow does the same.

Re:Fonts by rb12345 · 2011-03-23 06:59 · Score: 2

I'm using an nVidia GT 240 connected to a BenQ T241W LCD running in its native resolution of 1920x1200 via HDMI on Windows 7 Ultimate, with graphics drivers updated earlier this month and I'm seeing the font issue as described by the previous poster.

Some letters look randomly bolded. Some letters look randomly thinned.

I believe I've done ClearType tuning already.

In my case, that seemed to be a side effect of the hardware acceleration. If you set gfx.direct2d.disabled=true in about:config and restart Firefox, that might fix the issue for you.

Re:Seems Slow To Me by greed · 2011-03-23 07:02 · Score: 2

You might also have a network that's got just enough IPv6 working that FF tries AAAA records before A records.

If it's still there in 4, try frobbing network.dns.disableIPv6 in about:config to see if that makes a difference.

Re:Interesting idea by hairyfeet · 2011-03-23 09:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.

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