Firefox 4 second beta hits minor delay Mozilla has delayed the second beta release of Firefox 4 by about a week. The open source browser maker had tentatively planned to sling out Firefox 4 beta 2 late last week. However, Mozilla has now pushed that release back to Thursday, 29 July. “Hi! We're glad you're interested in Firefox 4 Beta 2 - it's not quite ready yet …
They're simply going back to a multi process model which they should never have left instead of the trendy (for people who don't have a fucking clue) multi threading model which was the bandwagon that they jumped on and meant that a bug in one page could crash everything.
Netscape / Mozilla has only ever used multi-process for some crypto and that was to avoid some licencing issues that were later resolved.
Traditionally for plugins they have run in-process with some system traps to try and cope with certain kinds of recoverable exceptions. The reason they plugins run in-process is because its incredibly difficult to run them out of process. For starters, plugins can be scriptable so JS calls have to be marshalled in both directions, accounting for issues like recursion. Then there is the general issue of dealing with unresponsive / dead plugins. How do you know when the plugin is dead / unresponsive as opposed to merely busy? How do you deal with plugins which are firing possibly hundreds of events out via callbacks? How do you deal with WINDOWLESS plugins where the plugin expects to draw directly into the HTML view? How do you feed the plugin with data from a URL while keeping your cache consistent and correct etc.
Mozilla feels it has resolved most of these issues but just ranting away as you did shows you have no understanding of why things are the way they are.
... but all i want from a browser is for it to be secure, to be able to run the sites i want to visit smoothly, for it not to be a resource hog and for it not to be a bloated pile of crap! Is that too much to ask?
I dont need to be able to integrate a million piles of web2.0rhia per page, or have a thousand tabs open, or any of the other bloat inducing excesses that keep being introduced in Firefox recently.
Here's an idea, add those things as add ons which a person can download to customise their firefox experience, and leave the basic functionality (and size and memory usage) as low as possible so that those of us who dont give a flying f*&k about Stephen Fry's latest Twittergasm can just use Firefox as a browser and not have to sacrifice half our system performance to view a single bloody page!!!
[/End Rant]
"not have to sacrifice half our system performance to view a single bloody page!!!"
Unfortunately the people who develop web browsers don't see their bloatware as just an internet client - they see it as an operating system in waiting. And thats the way they're pushing things. Not just firefox devs - all of them. They're not smart enough to do kernel hacking so they hack browsers instead and try and pretend that one day it'll be the One True Platform. Yes they're deluded but thats nothing new for web types.
... if "4 second beta" was the time taken for the firefox beta to load and be ready for use.
Most of the things that currently happen during startup (including checking for updates) should be performed some other time. More important is to display the address bar and be ready to start browsing to the chosen address.
Anything else can be performed later. For example, when shutting firefox down (or, even better, when shutting windows down).
I've been checking it out for about a week now. I went to the FTP site and downloaded it. When I first installed it, I was all prepared to give the new Firefox a thumbs down for being too much like Office 2007. Luckily, I noticed the orange Firefox icon in the upper right hand corner with the down arrow. Click on the icon, go to customize and click on Menu bar, and BAM, you have the menu bar back. To disable it again, click on view, go to Toolbars, and click on Menu bar again. Quite easy, and much better than what Office has done. So far in testing, I have not run into a problem.
Written using Firefox beta 2.
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