Firefox 4, A Huge Pile of Bugs 481
surveyork writes "Firefox 4.0 beta 9 (AKA 'a huge pile of awesome') was released on January 14, 2011. Firefox 4's release schedule includes a beta 10 and a release candidate before the final launch in late February. However, one wonders if this schedule won't slip again, since there are still more than 100 'hardblocker' bugs, more than 60 bugs affecting Panorama alone and 10 bugs affecting the just-introduced Tabs-on-Titlebar. Some long-standing bugs won't be fixed in time for Firefox 4 final either (example, example). Many startup bugs are currently pending, although Firefox 4 starts much faster than Firefox 3.6. As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst Firefox enthusiasts. Perhaps we'll have to wait until Firefox 4.1 to have this 'huge pile of bugs' (mostly) fixed."
In the spirit of more "freedom" for their users... (Score:3, Interesting)
...they took away even the *option* to have the status bar.
I guess in the true OSS way I'll have to fork the project and add my own. ;)
(yes yes, sarcasm. probably best to spell it out ahead of time, because what slashdot post isn't complete these days without a plethora of disclaimers and qualifiers)
The necessary qualifier to ensure my criticism of open source software doesn't earn me a minus 1: I like open source.
The necessary disclaimer that forking FF is silly: I am well aware that third party extensions for FF4 exist that add status bar function.
Re:Who cares about bugs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, man, isn't that the case.
When I tried the new beta, the first thing that happened was that it popped up a "welcome" page touting how fast the new beta was.
Then it froze long enough to get Windows to mark it (Not Responding) in the title bar. (I reenabled the menu while using an earlier beta so I guess I'm missing out on "tabs in title bar." Somehow, I don't care.)
To their credit, it doesn't always do this, but it does it enough to be annoying. I don't care how fast Firefox can run JavaScript - really all I care about is that running JavaScript doesn't make the browser completely non-responsive.
Re:Who cares about bugs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Javascript speed is a strange thing to compete so fiercely on. I don't want to calculate fast fourier transforms in my browser.
Heavy DOM manipulation, and the subsequent redraw is where browsers really hit the wall. Opera seemed to be fastest last time I benchmarked.
Re:FF4 vs. Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome is better in just about every way with the exception of extensions. There are basically two killer features that work better under Firefox than Chrome: script blocking (NoScript) and ad blocking (AdBlock Plus). There are ad blocking extensions for Chrome, but they don't work quite as well as AdBlock Plus does.
There is no real equivalent to NoScript for Chrome. There are a bunch of things that kinda provide script blocking functionality, but nothing that's anywhere near as good as NoScript.
Beyond that it's much faster and more memory efficient. It doesn't like being left open long periods of time, though. I can get away with leaving Firefox open for like a week or so, Chrome pretty much demands that you kill it and restart it every day. Not really a huge deal.
The only thing I really miss in Chrome is NoScript. The ad blocking is mostly good enough.
Re:FF4 vs. Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox is slower (in my case it currently hangs for roughly a minute on start-up. Keep those windows open), has better extensions and the best memory management I've ever seen in a browser (used to be a pet peeve of mine, when they still sold memory leaks as features). Chrome has some great features if you connect to the cloud to socialize your AJAX relationships or something (e.g. you can treat browser pages like apps with start menu entries and stuff - although I always have to reload many manually after launch for it to work properly). It's fast and it will always be up-to-date. That's because Google puts its update service (pray to god that that's all it does) everywhere you can fit that stuff on Windows. There's the Autostart entry, the delayed start, the service, the IE plugin, the Firefox plugin, the Opera plugin and probably a few I missed. But don't be afraid that it's gonna spy on you. Many of the bleeding edge features (Google's new app-store) only work if you log-in with your Google account so they're gonna know every thing about you anyway.
That's what I mean with slightly creepy. Your neighbor might have never given you any reason to question his integrity but if he insists on going through your trash and wants to install a camera in your bathroom you're probably gonna be suspicious.
Longest standing bug (Score:5, Interesting)
Eyecandies first, stuff that matters maybe.
Re:No ACID3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Except SVG Fonts are going to be an optional part of the SVG standard, because the standards committee recognizes they are unimportant. This is because superior alternatives exist (WOFF). This is why Mozilla chose not to implement SVG Fonts. Despite all the FUD in the summary (what is with the anti-Firefox FUD in stories lately, anyway?), the vast majority of Firefox users are not crying out for Firefox to pass a meaningless, arbitrary, and outdated acid test. SVG Fonts are what keeps Firefox from passing the test. There is no benefit to adding that feature except to pass the Acid3 test.
Re:No ACID3 (Score:5, Interesting)
This part of the standard is being errataed to be optional.
And yes, people skip parts of standards all the time if they don't think they're important, especially when the standard was created for a totally different use case (in particular, SVG as originally written was basically created to not be used with HTML and not be used on the web; there were nods to both but they were not the primary use case). How many zip decompressors actually allow multiple copies of the same file to be present in the archive and look at the index to see which one to extract? How many just grab whatever they find?
You may also want to read http://dbaron.org/log/2004-06#e20040609a [dbaron.org] and http://dbaron.org/log/2006-08#e20060818a [dbaron.org] for some of the history here...
Re:Who cares about bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox devs seem to listen better than Chrome's (Score:5, Interesting)
I've reported dozens of Firefox bugs over the years. Although I'm primarily a chip designer, I have studied usability (HCI, etc.), and I have a background in testing as well. I know about making intuitive systems, and I've been trained to be more objective about it, rather than just complaining about what I don't like. When I report Firefox bugs, they may get ignored because they're understaffed, but I've never had one tell me flat out that I was wrong. I HAVE had Chrome devs just tell me I'm wrong. Does working for Google automatically make you arrogant?
Re:Firefox devs seem to listen better than Chrome' (Score:4, Interesting)
Having about 30 Google or ex-Google employees in my friends or friends of friends circle and having talked with probably 40 or more at various parties and other events over the years I can say that it's about a 75-85% arrogance rate. Some worse than others. I believe the culture helps promote it. Generally the ones who aren't raging assholes are the ones who arrived there after spending some time in other parts of the industry or advanced academia (PhD work or professorial). The kids who went there right out of undergrad are the worst since Google does a great job of sheltering them from the real world. At this point if I meet anyone who's under 27 or so and has worked at Google for a while I assume any conversation will be unproductive unless I agree 100% with what they're saying. I'll be pleasantly surprised if this isn't the case.
On the plus side, the people I know who've escaped the clutches of Google often display a very serious drop in arrogance levels within a year or so.
Re:Who cares about bugs? (Score:4, Interesting)
I should just re-submit the bug and see what happens.
Yes, this often works. I've been on bugs with like a hundred cc:'s that've been open for years with 129 comments and lots of rationalization that have been closed 'DUPLICATE' of a bug opened a few months ago, got the attention of some other developer who thought he owned it, and it got fixed inside two weeks.