Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion. And that's what counts -- whatever they may say about the NUMBER of outstanding bugs, it's only the bugs that hit a typical user on a typical day that matter for the perceived stability of a program. With a few more weeks of spit and polish, Firefox 4 should be even with the competition in terms of daily stability. The fact the Mozilla advertises its bug list more than, say, IE9 should not make people think its known bug list is longer than IE9's.
Firefox's library of well-functioning and stable extensions (and...cough...other extensions) is larger. If you need those plug-ins, it's a no-brainer. If you plan to use the browser "stock" it really comes down to personal preference on the interface and what happens to be more stable on your system. Firefox 3 has gotten rather slow and long in the tooth, so my personal browser preference (this week) runs something like Firefox 4 beta > Opera > Chrome > Safari > Firefox 3 > wget > Internet Explorer.
1) Never, ever, EVER allow time travel. Every single timeline can be undone. Nothing is believable. 2) Just because the special effects are awesome doesn't mean you don't need great writing. 3) Episodic shows are sitcoms (Star Trek I), and each episode needs to stand alone in a compelling and memorable way. Progessive shows (BSG reboot) need to have a sense of progress in each episode. Using episodic episodes in a progressive shows is OK for a break, but not because you've run out of ideas for progress. If you have run out of ideas for progress, KILL THE SHOW now, on your own terms, before it is cancelled. Take a few months off, pick a new story arc, mix up some characters and start again. If you don't, be sure to buy lunch for your writers so that they will proofread your resume at the end of the season.
No seriously -- have an Amazon referral account for Wikipedia. Let users link articles to books on Amazon with more information. Link every footnote to a book to a "buy now" button. It's value-added, not random advertising, and Wikipedia would get a cut. In return for all the traffic, have Amazon serve the site for free. Then the only money needed is for the salaries of the full-time staff, which the book sales would cover.
Since there aren't ads everywhere, you can even continue asking for donations with a straight face.
But the reviewer said that eating uranium ore for a month had caused him to grow three heads. I did the same and I still only have one head. I want my money back!
Reverse 911 is fantastic. Just ask our neighboring town to the south that didn't use it when their water supply was contaminated. Yeah. My coworkers spent two days in the bathroom instead of 10 seconds reading a text.
Actually more a fear of lack of civilization that fear of civilization. The odds of raped and killed in a state bordering Mexico is probably, what, a hundred, maybe a thousand times higher than in a more civilized area like Canada or some place in Europe.
No. Just...no.
Yes, there's a drug war between gangs in Mexico that is slaughtering a lot of bystanders. That in no way means people from Mexico are any more violent than anywhere else.
That's probably because Firefox supports fractional font sizes: 12.1px, 12.3px, 12.5px...
Every other lunkheaded browser rounds to the nearest whole pixel value. If the site developers use relative font sizes (ems, percents) and don't do precise math, the site ends up with a declared pixel size between values...and only Firefox delivers the declared size.
As a CSS guy, this means I find other browsers infuriating. Now that we have Webfonts I want to render ever piece of text with fonts instead of graphics...but getting a banner to just the right size is often impossible without a fractional font size. As a normal user, it means Firefox more often than not looks "wrong," because it's far enough ahead of the curve to be out front alone.
...for example their trolley system was allegedly "built in North Korea" despite the fact that it was several decades old and covered in German graffiti.
By "German graffiti" I assume you mean, "German praises to Our Dear Leader by the Western pig-dogs who were so amazed when they visited the best trolley factory in the world that they were moved to paint their awe upon the trolley cars as a never-ending testimony."
I've always gotten the impression that the betas are a bit more than a standard nightly, because they tend to have a set of milestones and less-bug-ness they try to achieve.
Eg: minefield w/new features >> minefield with temporary feature freeze and lots of bug-fixes >> BETA >> minefield w/new features >> etc
If that's the case, the original GP's complaints that there are lots of buggy new features in Minefield after the first beta is somewhat silly...because that's the point of Minefield right after a beta. But IANAmozdeveloper.
>>>Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days". I've been using Minefield... and it got a lot less stable once it hit the "beta" stage
That's weird. I've been using SeaMonkey, based upon the same mozilla/gecko core, and its beta is rock solid. I haven't been able to crash it, or even slow it down by watching lots of youtube videos.
Mozilla's "Beta" is different from Minefield. Minefield is the nightlies where they test new things and is meant for the benefit of developers and masochists: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/
Betas might have bugs, but they're meant to mostly work. Minefield might work, but it's meant to mostly have bugs.
Chrome is definitely faster and more stable on a Mac than FF 3.6. The FF4 beta 6 is just about at parity; there was a huge difference halfway through the betas once they sandboxed Flash.
I've been very happy with beta 6, and imagine the final release will be pretty solid.
My guess would be that GP is not running stock Android but a version modified by the handset manufacturer (or is just running an outdated version like 1.6). Motorola has had some very well-known screw-ups with their Android 2.2 releases for newer phones, likely due to errors made while updating their Motoblur layer..
Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability
That's an amazing crystal ball you have there. Can you wrap you arms around it?
I'm talking backwards, not forwards -- having been tech support in my office for early gen iPhones, I feel like the current Android OS is still working out things that Apple solved years ago. Going forwards -- of course, who knows? The next update might fix everything. Froyo certainly helped a lot.
I may just be cranky because my phone lost all my podcast subscriptions yesterday from a Google-native app. If nothing else, I expect the phone dialer and the podcasts to work flawlessly.
As an Android end user, I must say I haven't experienced the "endemic" reliability issues you are talking about. I think your sentiment that Android is "years and year behind the iPhone" is years and years out of date.
That may be. I'm on a Droid 1; it's entirely possible that the problems I'm having come from Motorola's drivers and are not Google native. And the 2.2 update cut my instances of crazy stupid database corruptions dramatically. And its possible the newer, faster processors can multitask more effectively, which would solve the freezes. My next phone might change my mind.
<troll> "Android is the next Windows" - remember you read that here on/. first... </troll>
I'm not trolling: I really think that. Feature proliferation and platform proliferation without rigorous attention to bug fixing makes for a dominant but buggy platform. That is my experience with Windows and with Android.
Note I am NOT equating Google with Microsoft. They have very different corporate cultures and like every Slashdot member you can guess which I prefer. Also note that I LIKE my Android phone. I'm just saying I see it playing a similar role: device manufacturers slap Windows on crappy PCs with crappy drivers and sell large numbers of them cheap. I see them doing the same with Android. Who knows if the problems on my phone come from Google or Motorola? The point is that the way the system is implemented leaves it open to certain behaviors, and those behaviors are similar between Windows and Android.
Horror stories? No, I've never lost everything. However I (and MANY) Exchange users have to synch less than one week of e-mail or the phone drops the e-mail account and all the messages ( http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4980http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4866 ). Last week the Google "Listen" app in charge of my podcasts decided to randomly delete all of my data. The phone regularly freezes for 10-60 seconds while handling multitasking, during which time native apps like THE PHONE in the foreground stop working. And yes, I have had to pull the battery on occasion to make calls.
None of these are horror stories, and I, as a geek, am content to shrug and deal with them, because frankly I really like the phone and prefer the interface and browser to the iPhone. But it's a conditional love.
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
My expectation is for smartphones (at least in the US) to eventually take the path of PCs, with Android as the Windows-analogue "most prevalent but somewhat buggy" OS, Apple as Apple, and everything else (Blackberry, WebOS, Maemo) as the "they work awesome but who uses them?" Linux distros.
Dvorak helped me, but switching to a Kinesis Advantage helped much more, as well as sleeping with wrist braces when things get bad.
That said -- as for the problem of not having one thumb: this is all the more reason to use something like a Kinesis Advantage -- on-keyboard key remapping. You not only get one of the best ergonomic arrangements possible, but with about 5 minutes of moving keys around you can have a full key arrangement that shifts all functions to your best fingers. There's also an optional foot pedal, the ability to chain macros, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the blank page bug too -- moving the window causes the page to display. Silly workaround, but I'm sticking with the betas.
Beta 9 is more stable than previous releases, and about even with Firefox 3 in my opinion. And that's what counts -- whatever they may say about the NUMBER of outstanding bugs, it's only the bugs that hit a typical user on a typical day that matter for the perceived stability of a program. With a few more weeks of spit and polish, Firefox 4 should be even with the competition in terms of daily stability. The fact the Mozilla advertises its bug list more than, say, IE9 should not make people think its known bug list is longer than IE9's.
Firefox's library of well-functioning and stable extensions (and...cough...other extensions) is larger. If you need those plug-ins, it's a no-brainer. If you plan to use the browser "stock" it really comes down to personal preference on the interface and what happens to be more stable on your system. Firefox 3 has gotten rather slow and long in the tooth, so my personal browser preference (this week) runs something like Firefox 4 beta > Opera > Chrome > Safari > Firefox 3 > wget > Internet Explorer.
I'm waiting for the inappropriate jokes at the kick-off dinner to toast the future success of the unit: the WTFFTWNSFWBBQ.
My new rules of sci-fi:
1) Never, ever, EVER allow time travel. Every single timeline can be undone. Nothing is believable.
2) Just because the special effects are awesome doesn't mean you don't need great writing.
3) Episodic shows are sitcoms (Star Trek I), and each episode needs to stand alone in a compelling and memorable way. Progessive shows (BSG reboot) need to have a sense of progress in each episode. Using episodic episodes in a progressive shows is OK for a break, but not because you've run out of ideas for progress. If you have run out of ideas for progress, KILL THE SHOW now, on your own terms, before it is cancelled. Take a few months off, pick a new story arc, mix up some characters and start again. If you don't, be sure to buy lunch for your writers so that they will proofread your resume at the end of the season.
Sell books.
No seriously -- have an Amazon referral account for Wikipedia. Let users link articles to books on Amazon with more information. Link every footnote to a book to a "buy now" button. It's value-added, not random advertising, and Wikipedia would get a cut. In return for all the traffic, have Amazon serve the site for free. Then the only money needed is for the salaries of the full-time staff, which the book sales would cover.
Since there aren't ads everywhere, you can even continue asking for donations with a straight face.
But the reviewer said that eating uranium ore for a month had caused him to grow three heads. I did the same and I still only have one head. I want my money back!
Give it time. I'm sure you'll grow tu mor soon.
Reverse 911 is fantastic. Just ask our neighboring town to the south that didn't use it when their water supply was contaminated. Yeah. My coworkers spent two days in the bathroom instead of 10 seconds reading a text.
Actually more a fear of lack of civilization that fear of civilization. The odds of raped and killed in a state bordering Mexico is probably, what, a hundred, maybe a thousand times higher than in a more civilized area like Canada or some place in Europe.
No. Just...no.
Yes, there's a drug war between gangs in Mexico that is slaughtering a lot of bystanders. That in no way means people from Mexico are any more violent than anywhere else.
El Paso crime rate (across the border from Juarez): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada#Crime_statistics_by_province_and_territory
Canadian province crime rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada#Crime_statistics_by_province_and_territory
El Paso would fall right in the middle of Canada's provinces for most offences.
That's probably because Firefox supports fractional font sizes: 12.1px, 12.3px, 12.5px...
Every other lunkheaded browser rounds to the nearest whole pixel value. If the site developers use relative font sizes (ems, percents) and don't do precise math, the site ends up with a declared pixel size between values...and only Firefox delivers the declared size.
As a CSS guy, this means I find other browsers infuriating. Now that we have Webfonts I want to render ever piece of text with fonts instead of graphics...but getting a banner to just the right size is often impossible without a fractional font size. As a normal user, it means Firefox more often than not looks "wrong," because it's far enough ahead of the curve to be out front alone.
These things will mutate and go on the attack....The only way to control it is LOTS of alcohol..
So...it's like a fraternity?
...for example their trolley system was allegedly "built in North Korea" despite the fact that it was several decades old and covered in German graffiti.
By "German graffiti" I assume you mean, "German praises to Our Dear Leader by the Western pig-dogs who were so amazed when they visited the best trolley factory in the world that they were moved to paint their awe upon the trolley cars as a never-ending testimony."
Cones of silence in pizza restaurants isn't news for nerds nor stuff that matters. WTF?
How is every word on that list not newsworthy stuff that matters????
I've always gotten the impression that the betas are a bit more than a standard nightly, because they tend to have a set of milestones and less-bug-ness they try to achieve.
Eg: minefield w/new features >> minefield with temporary feature freeze and lots of bug-fixes >> BETA >> minefield w/new features >> etc
If that's the case, the original GP's complaints that there are lots of buggy new features in Minefield after the first beta is somewhat silly...because that's the point of Minefield right after a beta. But IANAmozdeveloper.
>>>Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days". I've been using Minefield... and it got a lot less stable once it hit the "beta" stage
That's weird. I've been using SeaMonkey, based upon the same mozilla/gecko core, and its beta is rock solid. I haven't been able to crash it, or even slow it down by watching lots of youtube videos.
Mozilla's "Beta" is different from Minefield. Minefield is the nightlies where they test new things and is meant for the benefit of developers and masochists: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/
Betas might have bugs, but they're meant to mostly work. Minefield might work, but it's meant to mostly have bugs.
Chrome is definitely faster and more stable on a Mac than FF 3.6. The FF4 beta 6 is just about at parity; there was a huge difference halfway through the betas once they sandboxed Flash.
I've been very happy with beta 6, and imagine the final release will be pretty solid.
My guess would be that GP is not running stock Android but a version modified by the handset manufacturer (or is just running an outdated version like 1.6). Motorola has had some very well-known screw-ups with their Android 2.2 releases for newer phones, likely due to errors made while updating their Motoblur layer..
Your guess is correct.
--the GP on a Motorola Droid gen 1
Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability
That's an amazing crystal ball you have there. Can you wrap you arms around it?
I'm talking backwards, not forwards -- having been tech support in my office for early gen iPhones, I feel like the current Android OS is still working out things that Apple solved years ago. Going forwards -- of course, who knows? The next update might fix everything. Froyo certainly helped a lot.
I may just be cranky because my phone lost all my podcast subscriptions yesterday from a Google-native app. If nothing else, I expect the phone dialer and the podcasts to work flawlessly.
As an Android end user, I must say I haven't experienced the "endemic" reliability issues you are talking about. I think your sentiment that Android is "years and year behind the iPhone" is years and years out of date.
That may be. I'm on a Droid 1; it's entirely possible that the problems I'm having come from Motorola's drivers and are not Google native. And the 2.2 update cut my instances of crazy stupid database corruptions dramatically. And its possible the newer, faster processors can multitask more effectively, which would solve the freezes. My next phone might change my mind.
<troll> /. first...
"Android is the next Windows" - remember you read that here on
</troll>
I'm not trolling: I really think that. Feature proliferation and platform proliferation without rigorous attention to bug fixing makes for a dominant but buggy platform. That is my experience with Windows and with Android.
Note I am NOT equating Google with Microsoft. They have very different corporate cultures and like every Slashdot member you can guess which I prefer. Also note that I LIKE my Android phone. I'm just saying I see it playing a similar role: device manufacturers slap Windows on crappy PCs with crappy drivers and sell large numbers of them cheap. I see them doing the same with Android. Who knows if the problems on my phone come from Google or Motorola? The point is that the way the system is implemented leaves it open to certain behaviors, and those behaviors are similar between Windows and Android.
Horror stories? No, I've never lost everything. However I (and MANY) Exchange users have to synch less than one week of e-mail or the phone drops the e-mail account and all the messages ( http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4980 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4866 ). Last week the Google "Listen" app in charge of my podcasts decided to randomly delete all of my data. The phone regularly freezes for 10-60 seconds while handling multitasking, during which time native apps like THE PHONE in the foreground stop working. And yes, I have had to pull the battery on occasion to make calls.
None of these are horror stories, and I, as a geek, am content to shrug and deal with them, because frankly I really like the phone and prefer the interface and browser to the iPhone. But it's a conditional love.
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
My expectation is for smartphones (at least in the US) to eventually take the path of PCs, with Android as the Windows-analogue "most prevalent but somewhat buggy" OS, Apple as Apple, and everything else (Blackberry, WebOS, Maemo) as the "they work awesome but who uses them?" Linux distros.
Dvorak helped me, but switching to a Kinesis Advantage helped much more, as well as sleeping with wrist braces when things get bad.
That said -- as for the problem of not having one thumb: this is all the more reason to use something like a Kinesis Advantage -- on-keyboard key remapping. You not only get one of the best ergonomic arrangements possible, but with about 5 minutes of moving keys around you can have a full key arrangement that shifts all functions to your best fingers. There's also an optional foot pedal, the ability to chain macros, etc.
I think we're supposed to start guessing the next OS X name or something, as if we are children.
OS X Kitty! ( http://xkcd.com/231/ )