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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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"
"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
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.
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) .net framework assistant 1.2.1 (WTF is this anyway?)
Microsoft
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
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.
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.
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.
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.