Author Topic: Firefox 5 to be released only 5 months after firefox 4 goes gold (Read 14714 times)

Josh · « **on:** February 11, 2011, 09:18 AM »

It appears that Mozilla is at least exploring the possibility of an accelerating release pace for major Firefox iterations per the Google Chrome model, if not already working to make it a reality.

In this regard, users could be running the successor of Firefox 4.0 very soon after its release.

How soon? Well, according to Brendan Eich co-founder of mozilla.org and the CTO of Mozilla, Firefox 5.0 could be finalized and made available to customers just a few months after the release of Firefox 4.0.

Eich delivered the closing remarks in the first Weekly Engineering Newsletter, and while the focus was placed on the need to finalize Firefox 4.0 as soon as possible, he also mentioned Firefox 5.0.

At the time when the newsletter was published there were still some 90 severe bugs marked as hard blockers, which all need to be resolved before Firefox 4.0 could be launched.

In addition to the hard blockers there are also a few hundred less severe bugs which can always be pushed to maintenance updates for Firefox 4.0 or to the next version.

“Cast a colder eye on your blockers. Some of them can wait for a dot release or Firefox 5 that I do believe will be only months after 4 comes out. We are going to a fast release cycle. It serves our users better. To do that we have to get this touch and go done with Firefox 4,” Eich said. (emphasis added)

More at source

I have dropped firefox simply because I cannot take the sluggish behavior and operation anymore. I use opera now, but am considering moving away from it too, because it is quick and works fairly well. That said, I do not like that it uses 1.5GB of ram for 4 tabs. Also, there are quirks in it's behavior which add up over time.

IE9's release candidate is looking promising. I am giving it serious thought to moving back to IE if IE9 turns out to be as good as this RC is showcasing.

f0dder · « **Reply #1 on:** February 11, 2011, 09:55 AM »

Less time between releases sounds like a good plan - hopefully it means focusing on fewer features for each release, which should also lead to less bugs.

worstje · « **Reply #2 on:** February 11, 2011, 10:09 AM »

I use opera now, but am considering moving away from it too, because it is quick and works fairly well. That said, I do not like that it uses 1.5GB of ram for 4 tabs. Also, there are quirks in it's behavior which add up over time.
-Josh (February 11, 2011, 09:18 AM)

I wonder what kind of weird websites you visit.

Here I've got 42 tabs and the counter is at 584.000K according to Process Explorer for me. Sadly, I do agree that it does have some nasty quirks I really want them to fix.

They're focusing on mobile devices far too much as of late - the desktop browser gets noticeably less polish due to it.

wraith808 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 11, 2011, 10:23 AM »

^ They can justify the price to more people as a mobile browser than a desktop browser, so I'm not surprised.

timns · « **Reply #4 on:** February 11, 2011, 11:09 AM »

What do you people do with all those tabs? I feel like a wild man if I have about 4 or 5 on the go

Having said that, I do make extensive use of Check & Get to help me keep an eye on sites of interest that are getting updated.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #5 on:** February 11, 2011, 11:35 AM »

IE9's release candidate is looking promising. I am giving it serious thought to moving back to IE if IE9 turns out to be as good as this RC is showcasing.
-Josh (February 11, 2011, 09:18 AM)

I've been using the IE9 betas at home for so long I can't even remember when I started (6 or 8 month, or more). I'm quite happy with it so far, and hope to have time to install the RC this evening.

@timns - Research mainly. You start looking into something and the research branches, and something else comes up, and again.... (etc.) Next thing you know there are 75 plus tabs open on 8 different instances of the browser. ...And that's just on a "normal" day....

Josh · « **Reply #6 on:** February 11, 2011, 11:35 AM »

I leave 4 open. One is betanews, one is DoCo, one is my college site and one is facebook. That is ALL I USUALLY have open. At most, I will have between 8-9 but then I start feeling cluttered (although opera grouping is nice). I don't mind a browser using up a lot of ram, but 1.5GB for 4 tabs is just horrendous.

nudone · « **Reply #7 on:** February 11, 2011, 11:53 AM »

i hated Firefox for a long time, simply because of its start-up time. well, not strictly true, i couldn't see the point of it when Maxthon loaded quick and had loads of options built in.

but, eventually (not until Firefox 3.5) i saw the light. i still hate how long Firefox takes to load - so much so, i make it autostart after my machine has booted, and then i use ActualWindowManager to prevent me from closing Firefox prematurely, i.e. i get a dialog popup asking if i really want to close FF when i click the "X". this makes me think twice about whether i really want to close it - sometimes i do, most of the time i don't, i just click on it by habit.

so, FF automatically opens at the beginning of the day and stays open all day. doing it this way makes it feel like the fastest browser there is - obviously because i never see it loading.

i really have way too many FF extensions to contemplate using any other browser. which also means i probably won't be using FF4 for a long time, let alone FF5. not unless the extension developers are quick to update their stuff.

Edvard · « **Reply #8 on:** February 11, 2011, 09:50 PM »

Very strange, Firefox opens up VERY quickly for me.
Then again, it has ever since I've been using a better computer.
What kind of specs are you running on?

f0dder · « **Reply #9 on:** February 12, 2011, 12:56 AM »

Even from my Intel X25-E, with the user profile and internet cache on a ramdisk, firefox starts somewhat slowly - but I do have a few addons, and I'm very sensitive to slow startup times. A vanilla firefox starts faster... but who does vanilla?

mahesh2k · « **Reply #10 on:** February 12, 2011, 02:23 AM »

I guess firefox 3.6 suffers from plugin_container.exe issue. That could be one problem firefox taking more resources and slow startup.

nudone · « **Reply #11 on:** February 12, 2011, 04:01 AM »

yeah, definitely to do with extensions and not the machine. you can test this yourself using a clean profile of FF; start it up instead of your usual extension filled profile and there's an obvious difference.

Bamse · « **Reply #12 on:** February 12, 2011, 02:12 PM »

Don't know how much plugins add to startup time but disable them anyway Visualizing Firefox Plugins Memory Consumption Firefox needs an interface to deal with plugins, they are still installed behind users back. No way to block all new installs in about:config or anything. I have only seen one attempt to control the bastards Plugins Toggler

Mozilla is obsessed with startup time https://wiki.mozilla...up_Time_Improvements - almost as much as with html5 benchmarks. 4 will probably be faster than 3.

They actually say

Ship Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 in the 2011 calendar year

in the official roadmap page https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap Seems like they were drunk when writing that but of course a 4.01 can be called 5, 4.02 6.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #13 on:** May 26, 2011, 08:54 PM »

I just upgraded to FF 4 today. I have to admit it seems a lot less sluggish coming up off the HD. Still not snappy like Chromium. But for only running one process it ain't bad.

edit: hmm, just tried to bring it up while another program was making moderate use of the HD. Like 3.x it's really slow getting off the dime. Chromium just snaps open even on my 2 GB ram PC.

edit: experimentation shows it was Speed Dial bogging it badly. I've removed it from both Chromium and Firefox. It's a bit inconvenient not having the large graphics to select from. But so is waiting for the thing to load. I'll just have to get by with bookmarks.

Deozaan · « **Reply #14 on:** June 21, 2011, 10:41 PM »

Firefox 5 is out.

http://www.mozilla.c...m/en-US/firefox/new/

Press Release (?):

http://blog.mozilla....-multiple-platforms/

Edvard · « **Reply #15 on:** June 22, 2011, 12:49 AM »

Yep, I just upgraded today (not by choice, it did it automatically)
The only difference I noticed was the "App tabs".

Now if all my extensions would upgrade as well...

mahesh2k · « **Reply #16 on:** June 22, 2011, 02:29 AM »

By the way, is do-not-track feature =scroogle ? or is do not track is only related to cookies ?

Ath · « **Reply #17 on:** June 22, 2011, 02:48 AM »

Oh, my first impressions after just a few hours of use:
- More stable page construction (less moving of controls and page-expanding for a few pixels once the page is rendered)
- Finer quality of graphics display
- A tad quicker on most things, and much quicker on page-refresh (F5) for most sites
- Some plugins are getting a quick update because they are in fact already compatible

just my

Deozaan · « **Reply #18 on:** June 22, 2011, 03:07 AM »

By the way, is do-not-track feature =scroogle ? or is do not track is only related to cookies ?
-mahesh2k (June 22, 2011, 02:29 AM)

I admit I didn't really read the press release and haven't used Firefox much for several months now (probably over a year!), but I was wondering what do-not-track was, myself. I figured it was equivalent to Chrome's "Incognito" mode, but I really don't know.

Edvard · « **Reply #19 on:** June 22, 2011, 05:02 AM »

Short answer:
http://donottrack.us/

TL;DR:
http://www.w3.org/20...-privacy/report.html

Deozaan · « **Reply #20 on:** June 22, 2011, 06:25 AM »

http://donottrack.us/

TL;DR
http://www.w3.org/20...-privacy/report.html
-Edvard (June 22, 2011, 05:02 AM)

Thanks for the info! I think you got it backwards though. The top link is the one to read if you don't want to see a wall of text. The bottom one is the one for in depth explanation.

Edvard · « **Reply #21 on:** June 22, 2011, 11:47 AM »

Right.
Sorry about that, that's why I put the TL;DR closer to the W3 one, but maybe a colon after would have made it more clear, and maybe a header for the first entry as well.
Edited. How's that?

Deozaan · « **Reply #22 on:** June 22, 2011, 05:38 PM »

Well, I admit I don't really use the TL;DR thing much (I only fairly recently found out what it meant!) so maybe I don't know how to use it, but I've always been under the impression that the TL;DR label goes before or in reference to the short version.

e.g. TL;DR: [summary]

[Long version here].

Though it seems most people do it more like this:

[Long version here]

TL;DR: [summary]

But as I said, I could be wrong, and if so then it seems you had it right all along and it was just me who was confused.

cmpm · « **Reply #23 on:** June 22, 2011, 05:47 PM »

This add-on helps the others work and shows more info as well as reporting to add-on developers.

https://addons.mozil...c=external-fxrelnote

kyrathaba · « **Reply #24 on:** July 10, 2011, 10:04 PM »

I upgraded today from FF3.6 to 5.0. It does seem to load pages faster. But it's given me a couple hiccups about automatically logging me into DC and another site or two.