RSSPublic Firefox 3.6 beta now expected Wednesday, 3.5.4 Tuesday
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 26, 2009, 3:12 PM
During a Mozilla developers' planning meeting today, it was officially announced that Firefox users will begin seeing notices for version 3.5.4's availability beginning tomorrow (October 27). Full information about security issues addressed by this regular update will probably be released at that time, although Betanews tests indicate that Windows 7 users in particular will probably notice a bit of a speed boost, on account of improved document load times.
The first public beta of Firefox 3.6, which adds even more Windows 7 integration, will be released the following day. It will probably not be the final public beta for the product, as a development cycle for Beta 2 has been ongoing since the Beta 1 code was frozen last October 14.
As Betanews reported before, our tests show Firefox 3.6 speed gains to be sizable on all platforms, now pulling the venerable browser to within the performance levels of version 2 of Google Chrome (although version 3 is the current stable edition, and version 4 is its widely distributed dev channel build). However, we also expected to see the final public build ten days ago -- its released was blocked on account of newly discovered bugs. Some sources had reported the product was actually released, and a few went on to say it was released and then retracted; data obtained by Betanews from Mozilla indicates this was never the case.
Tomorrow's rollout of the stable version bug fix means the window for the next bug fix in that cycle moves to mid-December, which is not the most desirable timeframe. During today's planning meeting, contributors called for suggestions as to how or whether that timeframe could be adjusted.
1.7 MB isn't bad for an update, but the look of the release notes page is off quite a bit. Hopefully, that's the only problematic page.
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|Browser discussions are for the week-end . However as I'm here, Opera rocks , Chrome getting slower with each new version, and if it wasn't for NoScript only being available for FireFox , I'd be using IE8, but alas it is, so I can't.
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|Which operas are you going to? Most of them put me to sleep. I've never heard one that "rocks".
...and why are we talking about Opera anyway? Isn't this a browser thread? ;)
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|PC_Tool, I've reported you to the Opera Forums Overseer, and I believe a flock of Opera devotees are intent on censuring you very sternly indeed for your flippant comments about the thing they love.
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|Heh..
I just thought of something: Why didn't they call "Opera Mini" "Operetta"? ;)
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|I don't really get the one-upsmanship wiht browser times. When you're arguing about a tenth of a second, you spend more time talking than you'll save in page loading in a year. I have 8 gigs of RAM, so I really don't mind if FF takes up 200 mb with lots of tabs - it has the features (mostly in addons) that make it worth it.
I do recognize the use of slimmer clients on slower PCs, but I think flexibility and addons are where the importance is.
Score: 5
|Sloppy and bloated programming should never be tolerated.
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|Zagadka "I don't really get the one-upsmanship" "I have 8 gigs of RAM"
Lucky fellow.
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|Some FF extensions actually saves tens minutes for day in my case (Copy Links, Linkification, TabsOpenRelative). The time wasted by user on clicking mouse or operating on keyboard is difficult to be measured by benchmarks.
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|Neither should people that base which is the best browser on tenths of seconds or the name of the developing company.
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|@DrTeeth
Then, we should go back to some time prior to 1990 and start over.
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|Personally, my problem with FF (which does happen to be my usual browser due to NoScript and Adblock Plus) are the huge memory leaks... on the betas and daily builds, it bloats to well over 800mb-900mb in a few hours. On the 3.5.3 release, it's only bloated to 665mb and a continual 25% cpu usage (doing nothing) after a bit over a day.
So much better!
-_-
Doesn't matter how much memory I have, in my experience, FireFox WILL bloat to use it up if you don't restart it often. Not that others necessarily do much better, but...
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|I didn't have issues with FF bloat or memory, but Chrome simply came out with adblock, and I don't even need noscript, since there aren't the same sorts of javascript issues on Chrome we see with Firefox. noscript is a PITA to use, really it is... It's like UAC annoyance x50.
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|Already migrated to Chrome + adblock+ What a difference!
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|I agree that the code for Chrome is excellent. The problem that is still holding me back though is lack of add-on support and no drop down address bar. Until they fix those issues I am sticking with FF. Also I am not sure if they have addressed this yet or not, but RSS support is a must.
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