Firefox 3.5 Hits Release Candidate Milestone

macupdate writes "Firefox 3.5rc1 has started trickling to users (mirrors and appropriate pages should all be updated soon). You can read the release notes. RC1 still scores a 93/100 on the Acid3 test."

Re:Beta "99"

[Freetardo Jones]

That's the old preview build. This [mozilla.com] is the RC link.

Re:Beta "99"

[David Gerard]

This is actually the one after that - I had 3.5b4, got 3.5b99 last week and "3.5" today. The user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090615 Firefox/3.5

(yes, this is the NT laptop - haven't checked Karmic yet)

Re:A little anti clamantic...

[kaaposc]

just three? Gmail is beta for already five years [slashdot.org]..

Re:Still the slowest browser.

[mejogid]

CNet show firefox being substantially faster [zdnet.com.au] as of March in terms of browser performance. Admittedly firefox is a dog to start up, but that's one of the major goals for 3.6 last I checked. Having used the betas for a while, it's been a long time since I've felt I'm waiting on my browser as I did in versions 3 and particularly 2. I don't think anyone with a decent PC is going to be frustrated by the performance on 3.5, and with additional improvements already underway in trunk I don't think firefox is in any way falling behind. Oh, and how is private browsing broken in 3.5?

Re:Extensions

[Tubal-Cain]

Adblock Plus & NoScript work fine in Minefield, so they almost certainly will work in the RC. I don't know about other plugins, though.

Re:A little anti clamantic...

[A12m0v]

Every WebKit browser should be getting 100/100.

Re:A little anti clamantic...

[Just Some Guy]

4.2.something. The only problem I have is that /. changed their CSS in the last couple of days so that now the message header sometimes fills the whole screen and pushes the message text against the far right edge.

Re:v3.5 and still no MSI package for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't achieve the same thing in all cases.
Admins can slipstream the MSI as an update using their existing systems. The .exe requires human intervention.

Re:Beta "99"

[neiby]

That's incorrect. That is the Release Notes page for the RC, but the download link (mislabeled) actually leads you to Beta 4, which obviously predates Beta 99. If you install Beta 4 after Beta 99, you'll corrupt some files that you'll need to delete manually afterward. I learned this the hard way today. If you already have Beta 99, just check for updates from within the browser.

Re:v3.5 and still no MSI package for Windows

[Elgonn]

They don't achieve the same thing because the MSI while seemingly doing nothing more than an exe installer integrates correctly with Active Directory. You don't roll out 10k+ installs with an exe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer [wikipedia.org]

Re:v3.5 and still no MSI package for Windows

[tepples]

Pardon my ignorance, but this is a serious question; what would be the difference in downloading an MSI package versus an .exe if they both achieve the same thing?

Because they don't in fact achieve the same thing. Deployment of software across hundreds of machines in an Active Directory environment relies on Group Policy objects that reference .msi packages.

Not quite RC yet

[spinkham]

This is actually a pre-RC build, the actual RC should be coming in the next week.
See this site for more details.
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/06/17/firefox-35-beta-users-will-receive-update-to-early-release-candidate/ [mozilla.com]

Re:Still the slowest browser.

[anaesthetica]

Indeed, performance is the top priority for Firefox.next (presumably Fx3.6 although you never know). Codenamed 'Namoroka [mozilla.org],' the developers have selected several common tasks which they want to perceptibly increase the speed of, including:

• Startup
• Opening a new tab
• Loading a bookmarked page
• Autocompleting a location in the Awesomebar
• Play rich media content
• Animation and other interaction techniques to reduce lag between action and feedback, and to improve perceived speed

Re:A little anti clamantic...

[PuercoPop]

Don't hog all my memory. Konqueror 4.x broke Slashdot and digg so I had to stop using it and use firefox instad. But now Slashdot works properly again. I can use dig but I get a regexp exhaust error if I try to login in digg. I still have to use firefox for gmail and facebook though.

Re:93/100...

[BZ]

> This is why Web platforms of the future will not be based on specifications, but
> on the test suites.

Actually, no. This is why people are much more careful about not writing ambiguous specifications now.

You can't "test suite" your way to full coverage of something like CSS 2.1: too many features, too many combinations, too many things to test.

> If Mozilla wants to be seen as taking standards seriously again

Which standards? Some standards are more important than others. It might just be that stuff the acid test is not testing is more important than stuff it should be... (and is in fact the case with parts of acid3).

It might also be that supporting the standard and not supporting it at all are both better options than supporting just the part that the test tests.

So no, 100% test-compliance should never be the primary goal. Support for the standards that are useful to support should be.

Re:H.264 or Theora?

[Anonymous Coward]

Near all HD broadcasts are h264 and you should be thankful that TV industry didn't buy Microsoft's "but VC1 is documented too!" tricks.

No HD broadcasts in the US are H.264, unless you're defining that term completely differently from I do.

Re:93/100...

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube are owned by Google.
A Google employee is chairing HTML5, and Google have a lot invested in HTML5, including the video tag.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/html5

Yeah, I think they have plans.

Re:Open Source FAIL *again*.

[mr_mischief]

Safari's renderer is WebKit, which is open source and based on KHTML.