Firefox 3.6 Delayed; 4.0 in Late 2010/Early 2011

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.

Quote:

"Minefield" has been in Alpha/Beta for just over 2 years now...

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.

h4t_34t3rWhy 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.

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.

Shadow703793I 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.

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.

maestintaoliusUgh, 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.

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.

Shadow703793I 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.

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