Firefox 4 Beta 8 has been released
mozilla.com
Has the JägerMonkey, hardware accelerated rendering, HSTS protocol support, better web font support, etc.
mozilla.com
http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/serv/mozhacks/flight-of-the-na...
I had sympathy for that but it now seems to me like web technologies are improving at such a rate that we'll hit near-native performance in a few years (of course, technologies like Google's NaCl can do that now but it would be quite something to see technologies like WebGL and Javascript close the performance gap).
These demos really demonstrates the difference between Firefox 4 and IE9.
I pegged my CPU and got about three frames per second in both Chrome and Firefox, but that's on Linux with Intel graphics; about the bottom of the heap as far as 3D acceleration goes.
i have a lot of extensions that i use on a daily basis and yet only about half of them work with firefox 4 so far. some probably don't even require any code changes other than bumping up the version marker that lets firefox install it on a new version, but a lot of extension developers seem to wait until releases are stable before testing and updating.
So I think your problem is with a buggy install/upgrade, rather than the beta itself. Not sure how you can trigger a reinstall (dunno, do dumb things till it crashes), but yeah.
edit: to add, I'm on 64-bit Win7 too -- I've been using nightlies for over a year and haven't seen anything of this sort.
I hate saying this but Firefox 4 is shaping to be a disaster of epic proportions. The Javascript benchmarks are all nice and good but dear Mozilla folk you people also need to write a garbage collector for your implementation of Javascript that actually collects garbage.
Turns out, in Safe Mode it was perfectly well behaved, and after hitting the 'reset all preferences to defaults' button, Firefox not only takes less memory, but is snappier too.
I love and respect Firefox for showing the world there was a better way. But they are the Freud to a much more mature approach at this point.
I can't use Firefox without wanting to injure myself within five minutes. It is dead to me.
I'm not sure I understand your logic here. Firefox won't let you separate the back and forwards buttons, is that also a "rigid failure" in UI design?
Back/forward together makes sense. Refresh next to back/forward isn't any better or worse than refresh to the right of the address bar, so it comes down to personal taste -- Chrome imposes its own taste upon me, while Firefox is happy to let me decide.
2. Google
Oh, and something about extensions, too.
It's not the IE "why should I switch" situation - FF supports basically every page and any popular HTML/CSS extension out there. I've got my extensions and configuration in place. Why should I bother?
1) It's as modern as Chrome and renders web pages as well as or better than Chrome.
2) Chrome(Google) forces on me an UI I don't like. Firefox is extremely customizable and I can customize it to the last bit with extensions and little tweaking around.
3) Moreover as I have said before elsewhere FF + Sync + TMP + Adblock is unbeatable for me even though Chrome has equivalents.
4) Chrome (not Portable) installs itself into Users folders in Windows which I seriously dislike. Also take up huge space for storing it's Cache.
5) And I have some personal preferences which I miss in Chrome. (Selecting a text in Chrome does not snip the selection at the end of the line, it apply to the whole frame. Handling unresponsive web pages is better in Firefox for me etc...)
Guess I have given enough reasons why i have not switched to Chrome.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...
I tested beta 8 a few days ago, it was still twice as slow as Chrome 8 (Sunspider benchmark).
Beta 9 is not available. You are linking to nightly builds that will eventually become Beta 9.
That SunSpider score vs Chrome is nigh impossible in the default configuration. Maybe you have Firebug turned on? I'd expect the Firefox SunSpider score vs. Chrome to be very close, with the winner varying depending on the machine, OS, and release channel.
There is a stable version of Firefox (version 3.6), you can download it at http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/. Mozilla is also adding new features to Firefox in an effort to enable web developers to do new things in new ways. Development and stabilization of these new features is ongoing, which is why it's restricted to a beta program in the next version.
What would you prefer? That Mozilla abandon innovation completely and concentrate utterly on stability? That you not be allowed to participate in beta testing the next version of the browser? If you don't want to test Firefox's new features in the unstable version then perhaps you can avoid running the beta and just stick with the older version.
Yeah... Ok, I probably deserved a bit of a snarky reply -- I missed the 32-bit requirement for silverlight in the release notes (apparently their sandboxing for 64bit is broken). Just for that oversight, I'll take my lumps.
I do think, however, that you're thinking in a binary way about this. It's possible to add new features and fix bugs at the same time, ya know. It's possible to prioritize stuff even in a beta... you don't just pile on the shiny new because you slapped a "beta" sticker on it.
It's a beta release, not an alpha, and the eighth beta release. Right on the durn frontpage is says it should be stable enough for normal use in most cases. I would classify youtube as one of those cases.
As soon as the 7th release came out, it was broken in an obvious way vis a vis youtube video on some platforms. They had months to fix it. Mozilla obviously decided that WebGL bling was more important...
...and that's fine, they can do what they want and yes, it's a beta release and webgl is cool, but I still think their priorities are screwed up.
You can't completely rewrite various subsystems for performance and fix bugs at the same time. There is more going on than just 'adding new features'. New software is bound to be unstable while it is in development. If you have a problem with this, do not download beta versions.
Personally, I haven't had any issues at all with stability or compatibility on Beta 6 or 7 (on Linux).
And here's my snarky rejoinder: Hey look! There are bug fixes and new features in the latest beta. How did they do that? Perhaps they misunderstand the software development process!
What you have described is some ideal model of the development process based on something you think should happen. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't happen that way.
No one is reading what I wrote: their priority is messed up (in my opinion). Software development is very much about priorities.
You can decide that youtube functionality might be important for mac users for them to even continue testing the beta (e.g. no they(I) aren't(am not) going to keep launching another browser for every you tube video when they could just use safari). Or you can decide WebGL and audio (audio? really?) bling which a precious few will be using even in a year, is somehow more important.
As far as the final product is concerned, I'd bet that YouTube does have higher priority than WebGL. But that isn't the current focus of development.
> What you have described is some ideal model of the development process based on something you think should happen. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't happen that way.
Do you actually do any programming yourself? I'm really not sure what you're talking about.
If you want to watch youtube videos or have a multitude of extensions at your disposal, why would you try a beta version of the software when the stable version suits you just fine? How about if you stop being a smart aleck and contribute by reporting your bugs, just make sure your not being obnoxious about it as you're being now.