back to article Mozilla ices Firefox 4 beta 12 release to nail final bugs

Mozilla looks set to miss its February deadline for the release of its forthcoming browser Firefox 4. The open-source outfit delayed building beta 12 of Firefox 4 late last week, because Mozilla wanted to stamp out the few remaining hardblocker bugs found in the browser, before releasing the latest test build. Earlier this …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Good stuff

    It's good that they are desperately trying to stamp out on bugs. Sure, it is taking ages, but what is better? Releasing early with many bugs, or being late with major bugs removed?

    1. MrT

      Agree...

      ...especially since the latest beta hangs on stuff that everyone else is dealing with. For example, 'Verified by Visa' is still broken - FF4b11 can't load the VbV confirmation once the password is entered. IE9RC works fine, as does Chrome 9.0.597.98. They need to sort out loads more than that, but it is ironic that a user has to drop out of FF to something more leaky like IE8 to use a security feature (well, if that's what VbV is supposed to be).

      http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/beta/ has all the latest issues etc.

      1. Tony Green
        FAIL

        Security feature?

        Sadly Verified by Visa isn't a security feature at all, it's just a way for Visa to offload the risk of loss through stolen cards onto the retailers rather than suffer the risk itself.

        The fact that there's no actual verification that you own the card when you set it up or say you've lost your password blows up the idea of it being for security.

        1. Linbox
          FAIL

          VbV blows chunks

          I can't be bothered to remember YET ANOTHER password on the damn thing, so I change it each and every time I use it. Normally to something like "ThisIsAWasteOfTime1" (you have to use at least one digit).

          Never really understood the point of it.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          WTF?

          Title schmitle

          I forgot my password, had to call them. They (or I) had entered the wrong answer for "Mother's Maiden Name" in their password recovery Q&As. Since (after about 6 attempts) I could /guess/ the (untrue) answer that was actually in there, they let me reset the password. The fact that my initial response to "What is your mother's maiden name?" was not what they had in their database didn't apparently put them off.

          They wouldn't let me change the maiden name answer though - their security policies prevented it!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Currently a POS

    Really, I don't see them getting FF4 bug-free for a VERY long time. It's still got the age-old performance and memory leak problems, performance even at this late stage sucks badly when compared to other modern browsers like Opera 11.

    1. HMB

      Hardware Acceleration

      If Opera have implemented hardware acceleration:

      http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/operas-next-act-add-ons-hardware-acceleration-android/

      Then it's awful in comparison to Firefox 4 or IE9.

  3. Levente Szileszky
    Thumb Down

    Current b11 is AWFUL...

    ...and I don't see it getting better: memory use is HORRIBLE, worse than Chrome which was always the worst for me until I started using F4 betas.

    Speaking of hardware acceleration: did I mention Flash 10.2 is a UTTER PoS too? It crashes on literally EVERY SINGLE SITE, IN EVERY BROWSER when hardware acceleration is enabled (default setting), let alone its absolute crap PQ.

    1. SilverWave
      Go

      Firefox/4.0b12pre is pretty nice - None of your problems.... odd that

      Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110218 Firefox/4.0b12pre Firefox/4.0b12pre

      Loads of extensions as well

  4. OkKTY8KK5U

    Beta 11 seems to work okay for me...

    I suppose none of us should be extrapolating isolated, anecdotal data points out to a pattern, but I've been using FF4b11 as my primary browser for some time now (Arch linux, for whatever it's worth), and maybe it's just my usage profile, but I find it faster and lighter on memory than FF3. I have had it crash perhaps half a dozen times, and I inexplicably can't can't upload photos to Facebook's simple uploader. But I've forced it to accept some incompatible add-ons, and Facebook is a pile of junk, so this is not exactly a scientific experiment.

    I don't doubt that a lot of people are having problems with it, it's beta software after all, and I had occasional anomalies even with FF3. But if we're looking for anecdotal data points, mine is "good enough as-is for me." (I humbly request a "meh" icon.)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    nay

    ""From what I can tell, there are only seven unwritten patches standing between Firefox 4 and hundreds of millions of users. yay :-)" -- And all it takes is 1 to keep it away. lol

  6. Doug Glass
    Go

    I Dinosaur ...

    ...will just stick with FF 3.6.13. As with all my other age related aches and pains methinks I'll just keep what I'm used to for as long as I can.

  7. Mick Russom

    Firefox 3 is sad.

    I wonder if 4 will be usable. Chrome, Opera and Safari seem light years ahead of the fat bloated crashy memory consuming slow Firefox. The Firefox foundation is full of argumentative programmers that tweak stuff rather than address core issues.

    Its too bad, the interface is my favorite, but its a fat bloated mess.

  8. jacques 1

    Great!

    to me this is really good news, I don't believe at all in the 'regular release mentality' with strict adherence to deadlines and no quality considerations (Ubuntu, that's you). Much prefer the debian way, release when ready.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    fine for me

    I've been using FF4 since about beta 4. Main problems i had then were broken add ons. It's got better every time, FF 4 b11 is completely usable for me.

    I would love to use Chrome as by all accounts it is fast, stable and secure. Just two problems. The interface is completely uncustomizable - you have the buttons Google decides on, where it decides you have them and the size they decide they will be. You cannot change a thing. And secondly, the add ons are completely limited. In FF they can change pretty much anything, so most minor annoyances such as tab behaviour can be remedied if you find the right add on. In Chrome, add ons seem to be limited to adding extra buttons in the space provided on the toolbar. So my complaint about not being able to customize the layout and buttons cannot even be fixed by add ons.

    Chrome is up to version 120 something and it still looks exactly like it did first time out. I appreciate all the work under the bonnet but surely it's about time they did a little bit of diddling on the outside where its usability is awful.

  10. Defiant
    Grenade

    You have to be kidding me

    beta 12, LMAO. Mozilla is nothing more than a laughing stock now

  11. Defiant
    FAIL

    Beta

    Mozilla are proud to announce the Beta of the Beta Beta before the Beta, Firefox Beta 14 of Beta

  12. kissingthecarpet
    Linux

    I use the nightly

    and it hasn't had any obvious bugs for quite a while plus all extensions I use are compatible.

    And..

    What the fuck does it matter if they have 500 betas( - its about a releasing when its ready, unlike a lot of commercial software, which is about releasing it when you can get away with it. I'm a longtime Debian user as well - they've got it right, its ready when its ready.

  13. Jeremy 2

    Extensions, extensions, extensions...

    I'm sure most of the people who complain it crashes are using dozens of the buggers. I've been using FF4 beta whatever for at least a month now and I can count the number of crashes on the fingers of one hand. My wife, on the same machine, is cursing it for falling over every single day. The difference? I have a handful of well maintained extensions (Firebug, ABP and whatnot) whereas she has about 2 dozen of the buggers and it only takes one crappy one...

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm quite looking forward to FF4

    I much prefer the 'release when it's ready' way of doing things. I generally like stable. Stable is nice. Having said that, I've been using FF4 beta for a couple of months now and haven't had any problems. That can't be said of my experience with Chrome. I gave up on Chrome after they broke FTP for the umpteenth time. Maybe it's a patch that keeps getting incorporated into Chrome that just grabs the stats on how long a user will sit there waiting for FTP to start before launching another browser and grabbing a file.

  15. JB
    Happy

    Themes

    Works fine for me in Windows and Mac OS X. Just a shame about the dearth of themes - why did they go and change the way they're stored? Spent ages learning about how to create an FF3 theme, now I'm banging my head against the wall to convert the thing to work properly in FF4. I'm sticking to it, though, I'm determined to develop some nice readable themes for this otherwise excellent browser.

    And as for the Opera beating on here, I used 5 browsers, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari and the new IE9 (just for curiosity). They all have their good points and bad points. Currently Firefox is flavour of the month, but sometimes I'll use Chrome more. For me, at least, they all do the job.

  16. Tom Chiverton 1

    Shame

    Shame accelerated graphics are DoA on Linux (unless you have a lucky combination of Kernel and X versions), and their about to turn it off for ATI on Windows too :

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619773

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635861

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622127

  17. illiad

    Its only a beta... waiting for final, plus...

    themes, addons, even just simple button addons, all dont work... this is always the problem when ANY new FF comes out.. then you have to wait and hope that your major ones will get updated...

    Of course, if you are the one or two pages a day type, you dont see what the problem is..

    but if you are using it for lots of things, and need the extra functionality (from what is really a very basic browser) to do things like opening many pages in the background, checking the *real* link is not dangerous, stopping many pages with flash starting the video all at once, making it noisy, and overloading the resources, checking that those background pages have finished loading, and then organising all these pages so comparative views on that research can be made!!

    And guess what, ALL that stuff is part of a *standard* Opera install!!!

    - and yet I still have to use firefox for some sites, that Opera will not do properly...

    It is a shame that they have this great program, but refuse to make it more attractive to the public or advertise it more... I have given up on their forum, they are just too snobbish about feature requests, and change features and functionality to only their own agenda...

    WHEN will Mozilla actually put the basic GUI stuff in?? you know, you go to your windows desktop in XP, open a folder or two, and then you go to the folder on the taskbar and right click - you have options for cascade, minimize, maximize, and restore(from minimized)

    - Opera can do this too, if you enable the 'window' menu..

    so yes, if Moz can do all that, at good speed, then I can dump the rest... :)

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