back to article Mozilla delivers first Firefox 4 release candidate

Mozilla has announced the first Firefox 4 release candidate, after eight months of beta testing on the latest version of its open source browser. The RC is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac in 79 different languages. You can download it here. If you're already testing the beta, you'll be automatically updated. The new …

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  1. Scott 67
    Thumb Down

    64-Bit windows support NOT in FF4?

    Come on....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      64bit version is available...

      ...but for the moment only in the Nightlies, which in my experience are stable enough.

      Have been using them for months:

      http://nightly.mozilla.org/

      If you're desparate for Flash, you'll have to install Adobe's 64bit Square Flash Player, but you'll need to uninstall the 32bit version first.

  2. Renato
    Thumb Down

    Roadmap

    > According to Mozilla's public roadmap, Firefox 5 will offer a new account manager, a UI for "simple sharing", UI animation, and support for 64-bit Windows. Plans for Firefox 6 include a faster cache, support for Mac OS X 10.7, JavaScript optimizations, and a move towards "open web applications".

    Instead of account manager, UI animation, and "web applications", they should focus on performance, performance and performance. Firefox 3 is bloated, 4 have lots of crap (shiny, nonetheless). Firefox 5 & 6 will be pure shiny crap.

    Until there is a new browser supporting the number of extensions Firefox supports, we'll have to put up with this shit.

  3. mhenriday
    Pint

    Three cheers for Mozilla !

    Now if only some kind soul with deep pockets would purchase Delicious from Yahoo and develop an update compatible with FF 4.0, so that I can use my Delicious-bookmarks sidebar with this great browser !...

    Henri

  4. amehaye
    FAIL

    Roadmap

    The whole idea behind Google's development cycle is that they *do not* oblige to specific features in each version. That way they evade the programming death march. The Mozilla leadership missed the whole point.

  5. squilookle

    Just downloaded

    So far, so good.

    I agree with Renato though, I'd really like to see the focus being on performance rather than things like UI animation.

    On the other hand, I guess a lot of people, the type who want to browse the web but don't care about the browser they do it on, will judge the browser more on how shiny it is than how it performs, so long as it doesn't take too long to bring up Facebook or YouTube or whatever. I guess this makes the shiny stuff important to market share, and so it has to be done.

  6. Fully
    Thumb Down

    Panoramas

    Shame they've not put a "save all the nice panorama tab groups you've been playing with for 20 minutes" option in! Bah.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    And it's utter pants.

    Crashes frequently and still much slower and bloaty than Opera or Chrome.

    I figure Mozilla have just given up with Firefox4 and thought fuckit, just ship it.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    lets hope they Q/A it better than 3.6.14

    That release didn't last long before they released 3.6.15.

    Anyone know what broke in their Q/A process?

  9. Intractable Potsherd
    Thumb Up

    FF4

    I've been using FF4 for a couple of weeks now. I have found it more stable than any of the later versions of FF3: for instance, it doesn't seem to keep tripping over the Flash add-on, which I was having with FF3. There are still several of my favourite add-ons that don't work with FF4, but I'm assuming the devs are waiting until they know what their target is.

    It does seem to be a bit quicker loading from cold, but pages don't seem to render any quicker. Annoyingly, Mozilla have shifted buttons around from the places they used to be (Home and Refresh, for instance), and tabs are over the navigation bar by default, which seems to be odd, though it is probably just what I got used to. However, a few minutes looking through various menus got it all back to the way I like it.

    Unfortunately, we are never going back to the days of FF2, which was just about the best iteration of the program I used. Bling counts, and unless another browser comes along that is as secure and configurable comes along (and I haven't found one yet, though I'm open to suggestions), I'll stick with FF.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      UI customisation

      Right click on any of the bars, selecting "customise" and then drag and drop items where you need them.

      1. Intractable Potsherd
        Pint

        Thanks AC

        ... that's what I meant by "spending a few minutes with the toolbars".

  10. two00lbwaster

    @AC "And it's utter pants"

    There is malware out there that causes FF4 to crash but not FF3.6. You need to reformat your PC with a clean OS DVD and check performance again without installing anything other than FF4 and windows patches. Use an antivirus package, like a free one such as Avast 6, or a paid for one from a reputable vendor. Then install your programs one by one.

    See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633445

  11. Chris Evans

    Any memory improvements?

    Use FF 3 (latest versions) for any time and it gobbles all my memory. Is FF4 better or worse?

    Or could it be the flash or java plug ins?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Memory usage

      Much, much better, though having the latest version on Flash does help...

    2. Intractable Potsherd

      Memory usage

      It does seem to be much better than FF3, even with the Flash plugin enabled (I'd had it disabled for some time in FF3 because it seemed to keep crashing the browser).

  12. two00lbwaster
    WTF?

    What's with all the bad memory management reports from FF users?

    I really don't understand this. I have never seen large amounts of memory used by Firefox, I only see a huge amount of memory usage with flash apps running (800MB for the plugin container.)

    Do you all have so little memory that 100MBs make a difference between browsers?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    FF and memory

    Well my wifes xp laptop came with 512MB which at the time was fine, but I suspect both the OS and FF memory usage have gone up over the years. It was upgraded to 1MB a couple of years ago. Task manager shows FF3 using about 300MB when she first opens all her normal tabs, but throughout the day that grows and if she hibernates overnight then by the end of second day FF will be using 600MB (800MB VM) at which time 'commit Charge will be about 1300M/??M and Virtual Memory will be causing a lot of disc slaving. I've Just upgraded it to 1.5 GB (I'll fit the 2GB maximum when we can afford it.) IIRC XP originally required a minimum of 128MB!

    People in the know have told me FF has been riddled with memory leaks, hopefully they are now on top of that. Though I've just installed FF4 RC1 on my XP desktop machine and memory usage seems slightly higher with the same tabs open after a restart!

    I've just sat watching FF4s Mem Usage rise by 50MB whilst typing this. I hadn't even swapped tabs let alone open new ones for 15 mins. This does not look promising...

    It just dropped by over 50MB and I haven't moved from this text entry box, strange!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I want to like it...

    Firefox 4 beta (I've been using it since b9) has been very stable for me. I've had no major memory issues (though I'll admit, my desktop and laptop each have 8GB of RAM).

    That said, I found tabs-on-top annoying (I moved it, but why try to be like Chrome?). I also found it annoying that they switched the Home/Refresh button locations, and the "Open In New Tab"/"Open In New Window" contextual clicks. Some of this is just being a curmudgeon, but some of it really is making me move my mouse further from the web page I want it to be on. The tab behavior and home/refresh seem especially counter-intuitive.

    Finally, page rendering is barely faster than FF 3.6. While page loads are acceptable, in comparison, IE9 RC is lightning-fast, and Chrome is quick as well. This is the true disappointment. I hope it's just debugging code, but I doubt it.

    Still, without Adblock Plus for (insert browser here), Firefox still wins. While I've loved Firefox since 2.xx days, I find it a bit ironic that a single add-on is the biggest reason I'm still using it. I really hope they'll work on page load speeds.

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