

Mozilla delays Firefox 4 release until 2011 - andre3k1
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9193458/Mozilla_delays_Firefox_4_release_until_2011

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Malic
Very disappointing but better a little late than very buggy. If any Moz
Foundation folks linger around HN, my disappointment comes from how excited I
am for FF 4 to arrive!)

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corin_
Where did that closing parenthesis appear from?

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Qz
This makes sense -- I'm still on Beta 6 despite the bugginess, but it
definitely is buggy. I keep trying to customize the button layout (like adding
a history button, or moving the new tab button) and it mysteriously reverts
parts of the layout to default when I change it, but not every time, and not
every button. Odd. Also, Windows Live Mail is nearly unuseable.

The main reason I'm sticking with it for now is Panorama. Bound the hotkey for
that to one of my extra mouse buttons (mine has ~9). As far as I'm concerned
there's no other way to do tabs/grouping anymore.

The big thing I wish they'd do is lazy load the tab groups that weren't active
the last time it got closed. I have about 10 tabs open now at all times, and
it doesn't make sense to try to load them all at once. Panorama could
basically merge tabs/bookmarks/history all in one and revolutionize the UI,
but for now it's still awesome but kind of slow.

edit: I just turned on HW acceleration (windows only sorry), and the
performance boost is pretty amazing.

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tiles
I have been using "Firefox 4.0b8pre" (with Jaegermonkey!) for weeks. It's
really been a pleasant experience, fast load times, nice UI, and few if any
major bugs. Perhaps I just caught a good nightly, but nonetheless, this news
then comes as surprising to me.

I worry about delaying the Firefox release until next year (where FF4 seems as
much about catching up to the competition as it is new features), but if it
allows this chart to cross the green line, then I'd say that would be some
huge bragging rights:

<http://arewefastyet.com/>

~~~
instcode
I'm also using Minefield 4.0b8pre as my primary browser and always look for
new "nightly" update with hoping it solves the annoying bug: location bar
doesn't synchronize with the displaying page/tab. Other than that, FF 4 has a
very nice looking UI and it's fast.

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ditoa
I think this is a good thing. I tried Beta 6 just a few hours a go and it is
full of issues that stopped me getting back to a workable state (using Firefox
Sync). Reverted to 3 and all is good again. They still have some kinks to iron
out I guess.

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ashish01
Is it just me or is Firefox's quality actually degrading ? I have been using
Firefox since 1.0 and it was a really welcome change compared to IE. But now
compared to Chrome

* Its load times are ridiculously high compared to Chrome

* Sometimes when my netflix window freezes up, it takes down the whole browser with it (though I know its running in a separate process)

* Opening downthemall's manager window makes for whole browser unresponsive for a few seconds

* Detaching a tab reloads it (unlike chrome or ie9)

The only reason I still use firefox is because of firebug and downthemall.

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icegreentea
I'm using ff4b6 right now.

Firefox's page loading speed (especially with ff4b) isn't actually noticeably
slower on most sites than Chrome. Until Mr Flash and other plugins come
around. That's probably what makes FF feel so horrible right now. Flash video
just kills FF performance (just having the video paused in another tab) like
nothing else. They seriously need to fix the flash problem. Having flash crash
and bringing down my whole browser sucks.

Aside from that, downthemall's problem is the plug in itself. There's
definitely something wrong with how the plug in is written, not FF itself. And
I believe FF4 tears tabs correctly now.

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treyp
> Having flash crash and bringing down my whole browser sucks.

haven't OOPPs (out of process plugins) been released since ff3.6?

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icegreentea
I thought they were, so now there's a process called plugin-container.exe, I'm
guessing one for each different type of plugin, and if that crashes or stalls,
FF still goes down (or stalls).

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wh-uws
I understand FF 4 beta 6 is crashing like mad on me :(

I've had to use chrome for most of my browsing because 3 is too slow now that
I've tried 4 but every time my laptop goes to sleep and also randomly
throughout the day it crashes.

I'm a pretty heavy user though I keep 30 - 40+ tabs open on the regular

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thepumpkin1979
In the meanwhile Google Chrome is gaining more and more usage share... isn't
that the way IE dominated the market? Netscape delayed the versions because
they were creating a super Netscape Browser/Navigator?

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alanh
Chrome bumps version numbers for almost no reason. Not that that’s bad, but I
don’t think _release frequency_ was the biggest reason IE beat out Netscape.
Consider the 5+ years between IE6 and IE7 where IE6 was still 80% of the
market, for example…

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thepumpkin1979
Well I disagree man, this was the last release of chrome on October 19, 2010:
[http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/10/stable-
chan...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/10/stable-channel-
update.html) ... now Firefox, January 21st, 2010(it's been a while huh?)
<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/> but is not only about
the release time, look at the features, I can see more innovation in Chrome
than Firefox and more faster.

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drivebyacct2
Seeing as they have yet to make any improvements to the Linux interface, I'm
willing to go right on with my current assumption. Chrome is the place to be.

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jim_h
Firefox extensions will keep me using it for a while until Chrome or IE can do
better.

Firebug, Adblock Plus, NoScript, CS Lite (cookie management) and probably a
couple others make my browsing/development much nicer/easier.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Chrome is faster enough than firefox that the pseudo adblock plus is more than
sufficient and Chrome's built in dev tools easily rival Firebug. Not sure if
there's cookie management, but then again, I run CCleaner regularly with just
a few cookies exempted.

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wooptoo
By the time they release Firefox 4, it will become totally irrelevant.

