Who’s ready for Firefox 4?
A recent post on Mozilla’s developers mailing list suggests that the Mozilla Foundation is nearly ready to ship Firefox 4.
"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," wrote Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s senior director of engineering. "I'm seeing the same burst of excitement and activity that we've seen in the endgame of every release. Over the past several days, component leads have again reduced their blockers by identifying hard blockers and those we can live without," he told developers, adding, "We've around 160 hard blockers remaining, and historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left. We must press hard now."
Sicore says the Mozilla team should aim to clear those by early February, with shipment of the final version of Mozilla Firefox 4 scheduled for the end of the month. The director of engineering told developers that they needed to reach RC status as quickly as possible and as such, it was important for everyone to be an active participant in testing. He specifically warned them not to disable Flash or Silverlight and asked that Windows users be especially vigilant about reporting issues such as crashes resulting from hardware acceleration. "Don't just assume that someone else has filed a bug already,” Damon said. “Make sure."
"I know you're all tired and stressed," he continued. "You all do incredible work every day, and you've built an amazing product. Stay focused. Be nice to each other. Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass, and you should be fiercely proud of it."
Read his entire message here.
Oops, all fixed! Thanks!
mainly with how extensions interact with the UI, this breaks many older extensions that are no longer updated by their developers. For many this means losing the reasons they use the browser in the first place.
the status bar is also messed up, due to how some extensions interact they may create their own status bar causing the already screen space wasting UI to waste even more screen space.
Really though, I'm intrigued to see how this works. I guess you can say I'm getting all "Googly-eyed" about dropping Google Chrome. Hopefully this will be the reason, although I'm REALLY liking Opera 11.
Even memory usage is way better and still the first 4 comments are of chaps who use Chrome
Looking forward to another greater product from the Mozilla crew......
good: faster
bad: removed status bar, no color toolbar.
- is much, MUCH faster than before
- is multithreaded as much as 3.6.5+ for now, and the same, uses multiple processes: one process for the browser, one process to host the plugins (in case of plugins crashes (not like other browsers, that start a process per tab); while it doesn't help in case of browser bugs (a crash leads to the whole browser closing, Fx has the best crash recovery process of all I've tested
- its UI is still as open to configuration as ever, and going back to its 'legacy' UI is but a few clicks away - and once you've restored the menus, you can restore the status bar
- if Firefox 3.6 crashes a lot for you, I'd recommend backing up your shortcuts and security keys, make a list of your extensions, and then delete the user profile: more often than not, crashes are experienced due to accumulated cruft from version to version, a bad setting left behind by a plugin, a misapplied update etc. So a backup and restore should solve it. You could also open a Sync account, enable Firefox to backup all your personal settings, then delete the profile, and reconnect to Sync.
I find Chrome's interface offensive, personally, and Opera too "fluffy" - but then it's a matter of personal taste.
why do you need a status bar? if the page loads that's all that matters
I would like to see how the new firefox performs, hopefully great.