Mozilla Drops Firefox 3.7 from Release Schedule
Mozilla wants to introduce new features on a regular basis rather than release a new build.
Mozilla's Firefox director Mike Beltzner said on Thursday in an interview that the company is dropping Firefox 3.7 from its schedule. Instead, Mozilla is releasing incremental changes throughout 2010. This means that rather than dumping new features into a build once or twice a year, the team will instead offer them every four to six weeks.
Originally Mozilla planned to release two minor "fast-track" updates, namely Firefox 3.6 and 3.7--these were slated to take around four or five months to complete and distribute according to Macworld. Mozilla would then follow the two minor updates with a major browser upgrade in 4.0, slated for the end of 2010.
However, the recent work dumped into Firefox 3.6--which saw a release of the first candidate just days ago--convinced Mozilla to dump 3.7 altogether. "We learned an awful lot about what slows down our schedule, and that will help us plan future releases," Beltzner said.
Beltzner also added that the team is working on a separation of plug-in processes from the browser so that applications such as Adobe's Flash (which is apparently is responsible for more crashes than any other plug-in) don't crash the browser. The team is also working to run each tab as a separate process so that a website in one tab doesn't lock-up Firefox altogether.
Now if only Mozilla could reduce the amount of memory Firefox can consume in a session...
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Hmmm, Adobe products causing problems? No way. Adobe writes nothing but quality software.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
Results vary.
Firefox is MUCH faster than IE8 or earlier, Chrome, or Opera for me and the majority of the people I've talked to.
I've tried them all, and my favore it Firefox and Opera but Firefox is just faster, at least for me.
At some point you need to ask the question:
Is it me?
When you have a totally different experience than the vast majority, there is no conspiracy and the vast majority isn't wrong, you likely are however.
You know... There are several schools of thought on fast integrations of code vs longer deployments. I run a small dev shop with several new products per year and many to maintain and we moved from small and short to large and long... (I hear there's pills for that too)
The problem is that many builds often have to skip quality checks. Bugs/hotfixes to versions of software are difficult to track due to the "next version already being run". Many other issues with code merges exist as well were individuals writing code must push their changes into the to-be-released version.
On the good side, it's nice to hear they will be trying this approach, and sure enough customers will appreciate the features being added, but there is a cost to doing so. That cost may be quality and security.
Good luck Mozilla on that one!
rule 34 on the firefox girl!
There have been multiple benchmarks proving Firefox is faster than IE. Edilee012, you sir are an idiot or a troll.
Flash really has made a large impact on how much I use firefox. I cannot be on facebook zynga poker and pandora at the same time. The browser will just lock up or perform slowly. Lately I have been using explorer cause it does not do this. Probably because each tab is its own process. Flash is the sole reason I do not use firefox more. I cannot wait for the new release.
With a little tweaking, Firefox can be made to work even faster than it already is.
I also suffered far more flash related crashes in IE browsers than I did with firefox, and I couldn't be happier after making the switch.
For me, Firefox is the most versatile browser I have ever used.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
I prefer to use IE out of personal taste, and even I disagree with you.
They're right, Mozilla needs to work in Firefox's memory footprint. The ORIGINAL idea behind FIrefox was to be lean and mean because it was just a component of the Mozilla Suite (Remember back when it was Phoenix? Of Firebird?).
IE8 uses less memory. It's gotten more stable, but there's still too many vunlerabilities. Firefox is too big, and I get problems with Flash all the time. Never did like Opera, Chrome doesn't actually have any Google Toolbar functionality (ain't THAT something?) Safari is nice, but has website compatibility issues.
Nothing is perfect.
Hmmm, Adobe products causing problems? No way. Adobe writes nothing but quality software.
I believe you're being sarcastic.
From my experience, Firefox performs much better than IE. I've discussed this with my school's Techie, and we've began installing FF on a large number of systems (I like to help him out in my spare time.) Firefox is also more secure than IE.
Flash does cause problems with Firefox, but [as any Linux user will tell you], Flash is just overall terrible.
The one issue I have is when opening multiple tabs, and one of them is a .pdf (Adobe again, hmm....), Firefox often freezes up. I just wait it out though and all is good. Making each tab it's own process should help with this
Chrome is the fastest, but it simply bores me. It's a boring browser with (as yet) no useful addons. Firefox is slower than Chrome but is much more versatile as mentioned by another person. IE8 is good for my "works best in Internet Explorer" router config page, but nothing else.
I like how Adobe is singled out as the major source of the problem.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
I thought you said, "All joking aside". Surely, you can't think that IE is better than Firefox. Have we forgotten about security holes?
Firefox is a fast, stable and secure browser. Never in the last 6 years have I encountered a problem with it.
Shift the discussion to browser PLUG-INS, however, and Flash goes to the top of the problem list. For such a poorly coded, backward incompatible, resource hog of a product, I keep asking myself why nobody gives Adobe a kick in the rear.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
Lol....I thought you said that you had finished joking
I use Opera almost exclusively myself, on my work machine (XP) IE is excruciatingly slow, either to open a new tab or to close, but then so is Firefox. I can open Opera with 20 tabs in the time it takes to open a single tab in IE. That said, on my home machine (7) IE is MUCH faster, but I still dont use it. It lacks the features that Opera has had for a long time.
I dont think its Mozilla that needs to drop Firefox, more MS should drop IE and collaborate on another browser, or possibly a new open and standards compliant browser.
To clarify FIrefox on my work machine takes a long time to open, opening tabs afterwards if fine. FF is just not my cup of tea, I prefer Opera.
To you people talking about flash based problems with firefox:
I have problems with this too on vista and win7.
However I mostly use linux (Fedora12) and flash on firefox runs way smoother. This may be ironic to long term linux users becuase I think flash has historically been one big world of hurt on linux (more so than on other platforms that is). My opinion here is based mostly on lagging in pointless flash games that I don't play anymore.
@Pyroflea: (+1)
I've had that problem with multiple .pdf tabs as well. I find sometimes it works fine and other times FF freezes.
google chrome already has the features firefox is trying to implement. i am very pleased with the browser from google.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
you have to be delusional, it's the only possible explanation, IE6 completely sucked when ff came out, and if I recall right, ff2 came out when IE6 was still MSFT browser, and the speed difference was huge, ff was a revolutionary browser, for it's speed and reliability.
I hate flash it so CPU intensive that they made GPUs to try to help out. I would prefer if sites use Microsoft Silverlight. It is surprisingly better. I think it is one of Microsoft better software. Adobe is blotted software, just stick to Photoshop, not browsers.
If Firefox is going to be in my Ram and work fast, i dont mind it using the memory. i dont like it when it uses memory even when i am not their using it for no reason. Maybe a little tweaking could help a lot. I am sure they hear about that all the time. I give up memory for performance though any day, just slap in a 4 gig's of RAM and suck away. I do find it crashes or stops working for a few minutes sometimes. If though issues are fix it be a great browser.
Like that really matters today what with out 3 GBs of ram and 32 bit OS
One nice thing about Chrome is there's an addon that switches YouTube from using Flash to using HTML-embedded video. ANd yeah they DO have some of the features that FIrefox plans to implement. But there's a lot of websites that aren't 100% compatible with it. And come on: Google doesn't make a version of their own toolbar for their own browser?
What I have a problem with when Firefox goes one-process-per-tab though, is that each tab is going to be a memory hog, instead of just the one browser window. They need to work on memory footprint FIRST.
And Flash needs to be outlawed.
Like that really matters today what with out 3 GBs of ram and 32 bit OS
I've had Firefox use a full gig by ITSELF. That's just insane. But it's not hard to do depending on your browsing habits.
OK I will go first...Mozilla needs to drop Firefox altogether. That should get the comments going. All joking aside I still feel IE8 is far superior to Firefox as all versions of IE have been superior to all versions of FF. Yes I have tested both side by side and IE8 is faster than FF 3.5...sorry. Not to mention pages never load right in FF....I have yet to see what all the fuss is about.
If I were a bettin' man, I'd say edilee012 works for MS hehe
YES! YES! They are implementing my favorite things about Google Chrome and the only reason why I use Google chrome for anything! =D
And even better... they are releasing new features every 4-6 weeks!! YES!
I hope everyone else is as excited as I am! =D
I hope everyone else is as excited as I am! =D
As long as they keep the tabs below the address bar where they belong and don't make it look like a giant piece of glass (as the mockups suggest), I'm happy.
I used to be a huge firefox guy, but ever since 3.5, it has been too unstable to use, and it has bogged down my system way too much, even in safe mode or with ad/flash/script blockers. Me and most of my family have switched voluntarily to chrome. We all keep ff on for compatibility and some flash/wot add ons, but it rarely gets booted up unless we need it.
IE8 isn't even on our radar...
About RAM use: Firefox will use as much RAM as there is available, and actually adapt its memory use depending on available RAM.
Meaning that with 2 Gb of available RAM, Firefox 3.5 will take up to a Gb. However, if you only have 400 Mb, it'll take 100 Mb. If you have 128 Mb, it'll take 50 Mb.
IE 8, on the other hand, will always allocate a lot of RAM; using IE 8 on a 512 Mb machine is a pain - while Firefox 3.5 runs circles around it.
About tab processes separation: they will also perform their own RAM management.
Meaning that multiprocess Firefox 4 will make use of your available RAM - no more no less. Remember that they are using the very same engine that is found in Firefox 3.5 to power their mobile version...