[EricReesor]

I just put the tarball of firefox4 in my /home/eric/programs directory and linked a launcher to the firefox.sh. Great way to try out stuff without installing anything to usr!

I must say it is smokin' fast and boots instantaneously. And this is on a Pentium M 1700. Unlike the 3.6 series it parses javascript like a scorched cat!

Now I will start to try to kill it with some bazaar usage that I know causes browsers to have fits.

I think you can still try it out on Windows without installing (but I will leave that to the Windows Gurus) ..... Windows has become too difficult for a simpleton like me to wrap my head around anymore...

I still like audacity, firefox and other great opensource software that is easy to use and where developers actually care about testing, and so do not force users to install everything. Heck they even let you run their releases from anywhere you like for that matter. No hooks or crooks attached.

anyway back to testing...

Just opened a tab and surfed to http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/national_security/topics/69/ to see if jumping to full screen causes trouble like with the 3.6 series and mplayer does. Good news is that it is much better and does not freeze out! So javascript to embedded players is finally fixed!

Oh boy...no more flashplayer trouble at all as well..... just went to my favourite youtube stuff and sure enough the javascript did work perfectly! f11 worked flawlessly.

It sits there and uses 0 resources if you do something else and just keep it on the screen in the background.

I cannot seem to break it...yet

The browser sits at 0-0 on the processor and polls 79 meg with all sorts of activity post processed so obviously it is holding a ton of stuff on the stack so that you can do the backbutton and have it just pop up.

I would not recommend it for less than a gig of ram on older machines for this reason though. But on this p111 based m with 1.5 gig it really rocks! It should work really well on older machines with over 512 meg and not too much else going on at the same time. Mint Linux sits at about 230 meg +or- so anything over 512 meg of ram will work well. Can't see this being the case on Windows though but we will see.

All I can say is that on Linux it is the fastest browser around to date....except for maybe Lynx with no X if you have the stomach for it

 

[Cham]

I've been running firefox for quite a while now on my old Fedora server box. Mozilla seems to have always been linux/Unix oriented. Always easy to install, run, and is stable. When I have trouble with the windoze box loading video or specific web sites, I go to the old server and a way it goes...
Will look into this version later today just for fun.

-C.

 

[EricReesor]

On Beta 9 now

That was quick. Am using it as I post this. Lots of bug fixes and some interesting updates. Including a database indexing update to a new w3c spec.

HMMM Just hope it does not open up holes in the stack...

If I remember correctly there was a hole in Firefox a few years ago because of something similar being adopted.

At least with Firefox a simple indexing hole could never become a 10 year old javascript hole like there is still unpatched in IE...though a patch might finally come on a Tuesday if I am reading the chicken entrails correctly of how important Microsoft seems to think it is....

I wonder when a new beta of Chrome is coming? Google seems to be a little coy about that lately. This is perhaps not a bad idea, considering html5 web standards for video and audio are a moving target if they be not only h.264. This strangeness of action being attributed to what has heretofore been decreed from the Gods of video software patents and Our Lord Wizard of OS in Redmond! ....sorry about the Old English

Only problem is...both firefox and chrome will be essentially useless without a flash plugin.

The way things are going having any software from Adobe as a dependency for communication on the net is now considered dangerous.

The party line is now that Adobe software is really insecure and poor Windows users will always get hosed by PDF worms and Flash viruses if they use something other than Silverlight!

I do not love Adobe but blaming the worst Windows security problems on PDF and Flash is really lame and down right ridiculous FUD.

So do not hold your breath waiting for the FUD to clear this time ...I just hope the truth about what is really happening in the browser and format wars finally becomes clear to the general public again.

All and all it looks like Firefox 4 will be a lightning fast and stable browser just it might not work well without serious Mono updates if Adobe is driven out of business like Netscape was.