Firefox 3.6 Delayed; 4.0 in Late 2010/Early 2011

Copy cat.

With so many IT related products being delayed, 2010 should be a big year for the industry.

Oh no... The tab is the copy of Chrome's. I don't like Chrome's Tab. The Frame is OK, though.

Ugh, what's with this ribbon style trend that everything seems to be going towards? I hate these simplified, "clean-looking" interfaces with one magic button. I refuse to 'upgrade' to office 7 from 2003 (at home, at work I didn't have a choice) because I hate the ribbon with a fiery vengeance. The reason there's 50 icons on my desktop is because I hate having to go through 20 menus to find the file I need or to change the font. Maybe some people like to have everything hidden and pretty but I, personally, want most features right in front of me and 1-click away.

I don't care much for the UI tweaks, I am fine with the Fire Fox UI already. HOWEVER, I DO want native 64bit support. "Minefield" has been in Alpha/Beta for just over 2 years now... providing IE already has native 64 bit I don't see WHY FF can't do it already...

Anyways, 3.6 Beta 5 runs solid on Win 7 x64 and Fedora x64. All my ad-ons work fine.

You can configure the ribbon to include only the icons you want. SO its easier than before.

How about making Firefox less bloated. The UI is fine IMO, having tabs in separate processes would be nice and supplying native 64-bit builds for windows would be nicer but I really want to see FF become leaner.

Minefield is the name of the development (trunk) version of Firefox, so it will always be (pre-)alpha. As for 3.6, the first alpha was in August and pre-alpha development has been ongoing since around the first few betas of 3.5/3.1 early this year. That's not two years by any stretch - even Firefox 3.0 is much less than two years old.

I agree that 64-bit support for Windows would be cool, but luckily it has been there for some time on Linux.

Why do we need native 64 bit Firefox? Does it bother you that your flash animations can ONLY consume 2 or 3gb of ram? If anybody can provide a reason why they actually need their Firefox to be native 64 bit, I'll eat my hat.

PS: "I want all of my apps to be 64 bit because 64 is a bigger number than 32" does not constitute a good reason.

Even Opera seems to be on the move:

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/

The new 10.50 pre alpha snapshot with the new Javascript engine Carakan seems to be faster even then Chrome 4 beta!

Firefox has always had to long start up times for my tastes.

Coded properly, it could be a bit faster...

But, without 64bit Flash support (ADOBE!!!), how many are willing to use a 64bit browser?

I have been running 3.6 beta 5 since it came out, and have had 0 issues with it. It is much faster then 3.5, and I can not notice a speed difference anymore switching to Chrome.

I wonder why they are not taking it out of beta.

Um, I like the quick links, and you can always turn that off if you want.

Problem with the 64bit IE is you can't use it for Windows Update. That's the only reason I ever use Internet Explorer, and I still have to use the 32bit version.

UmmeNis: It wouldn't be any faster, and unless you're running a 350mhz Celeron, it should be plenty fast enough, since your internet is bottlenecking it, not your CPU. There is not an app out there that got faster because of being ported to 64bit. My hat remains un-eaten.

Especially now that we have monitors with very high resolution, now should be the time to start using up that extra space. I have a 1920x1200 monitor, so I rather have more options in from of me all the time instead of having to click 10,000 times to get to the option I am looking for.
I use OpenOffice, what I do is I open the most often used tools (dialogs), like the heading styles toolbar, or a color selection toolbox, and I leave it open on the side of the windows. I don't know if you can do that in Office, I have not used it for almost a decade now.

I don't know why Chrome is supposed to be that much faster than firefox. Sure for some javatests it beats it, but when i try chrome out it is much slower in action for normal surfing. Pages that have a big frontpage like newspapers with everything on the first loading page takes much, much longer on chrome than firefox and overall i feel that Chrome is much slower than firefox, except for a few select java dependent pages(where they both feel about the same when it comes to "snappyness"). Maybe it's because I use a lot of plugins for chrome, where I also have to use the 4 beta. They are built in a different way and aren't supposed to slow down Chrome. I don't know about it is much slower than firefox. Especially on the 1 gig RAM netbook where it consumed about 550 MB. It was painfully slow!

The stabler Chrome 3 version is useless to me since I can't use the plugins then!
Anybody else having the same real life experiences with chrome 4+plug ins compared to firefox 3.5.x?

I like the space saving layout of Chrome. I also love that Chrome starts WAY faster than Firefox 3.5. Even on a brand new Win7 build, FF is just so slow to start up compared to Chrome. Sadly, Chrome is super lacking in plugins compared to FF and still has some formatting issues. I don't care if Chrome or FF wins, but they need to meet somewhere in the middle to make the best browser. Chrome + flashblock plugin + better overall website support = bliss for me.

cuase they are useless, they cant even get rid of the memory leak that fire fox has had since 3.0, so yeah 64bit will be too much for them to do, Nothing really chages, FF is usless and falling behind IE8 which i feel is cleaner, faster, more secure and better

It's nice how they are designing the UI to be more compact to view more content, however, you can already do this through the use of add-ons. Just to compare, here is the standard theme, and my custom theme:

http://i45.tinypic.com/qzq59l.png

Not an issue on Vista or Win7, and on top of that if your machine has 64-bit IE, it has 32-bit IE also (and 32-bit is default anyway).

Erm... what?

On 2003 any feature that isn't on the menu takes 3-6 dialogs to get to. Most I've seen in 2007 is 3. Not to mention that once you get used to 07, it's much faster. If you don't like the default layout, just customize it. The ribbon means a LOT fewer menus. Your entire arguement seems like you've either A) never used it, or B) used it so few times you can' fairly judge and are just going, "I wasn't used to it, so it was slow for me. It's slow for me, so it must be bad."

At first I wasn't much of a fan either, but after re-learning how to get to everything, I'm at least 4 times faster than I ever was with 2003.

I avoid that problem by not closing Firefox unless I have to reboot the system to apply a patch. I set the computer to hibernate at night and then resume the session the next day. It works for me, try and see if it works for you.

I'm absolute like chrome; I am pretty picky with space and like its clean cut which makes for bigger screen to read forums in such but it is speedy

Oi! Put my tabs back below the address bar where they belong!

Neat... I wonder if this browser will make use of the gpu? I remember reading an article here at toms stating that this is where onboard graphics chips and future gpus will also be utilized within browsers... i wonder what for?

my FF doesnt really look anything like the default anyways. Smaller buttons, compact menu, hidden title bar, and other add-ons and customizations to make it use less screen space and be more efficient for my uses... that's really what firefox is all about. so as long as ver4 lets me make it look like i have it look now, i'll be happy.

To the contrary, I use it every day because we moved to it from 2000 at work a year or so ago. I could cite quite a few things that are irritating to me and ridiculously difficult to change but I'll limit it to two for now: changing how excel default formats entries based on how they were input (it seems to really love changing things into dates) and the fact shutting off autocorrect takes half a dozen clicks and has to be done for each style/format compared to the 2 it took in '00 and '03 and was global for the entire document. I also dislike the overly anti-aliased graphs of Excel that make me feel like I need new glasses but this isn't a ribbon issue.

Wasn't the x64 version a long while back given the dev name of "Minefield" also? Not just the dev trunk?

How are they coping Chrome? Technically Chrome copied Firefox, as did IE and pretty much every other browser out there. Optimizing it and making it faster is not copying, simply a good move business wise.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....................