News - Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 1

[HEXUS]

Regular new beta releases planned as Mozilla looks for public feedback on the next major revision of its browser.

Read more.

[crossy]

Performance: We know that performance is important. In this version, we focused on improving responsiveness at start-up and during page loads. This is just the beginning for performance improvements in Firefox 4.

Yay! - FF used to be an MX5 (small, quick and cute) now it's a truck (big and slow), so anything that kicks it up the butt will win kudos from me. Heck, I now use Chrome on my Linux boxes as much as I use FF. (I don't use Chrome on Windows, because it keeps calling home to Google)

So if they also want to look at the footprint (memory requirement) of FF then that'd also be well received by me.

I'm definitely not that bothered about the DB, webconsole, sockets or video stuff - nice to have, but not essential in my opinion. In fact some of this sounds suspiciously like abilities that would be better delivered via plug-ins.

At the moment my ideal browser would be cross-platform, small, fast, secure and tweakable (I mean with useful stuff like NoScript or AdBlock).

Bob

[Tobeman]

I don't use Chrome on Windows, because it keeps calling home to Google)

Have you considered SR Ware Iron?

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

[Unique]

i downloaded this earlier but haven't installed yet. i'm a bit wary about losing add ons so i'll try on another pc first, unless you can keep your old version of firefox to fall back on?

[MSIC]

Using this now on one of my machines, it works well so far and am liking it.
It is faster,although we shall see once the various updates, patches and extra functionality over the coming weeks and months starts piling on...
I only had 2 add-ons for FF3.6 (on this machine), Persona's and Adblock Plus. Both automatically and flawlessly transferred.

Not much else to say really... i quite like the filling-up clock icon as a page loads.

[g8ina]

@ crossy : tried Slimbrowser ??

[Jay]

hotmail is still broken

[Developer-]

Think I'll wait for RC stage before I upgrade, cba configuring all my addons again just for more betas/RCs to be released.

[Muns]

I'm looking forward to the performance initiatives in the new versions.. It's probably an addon I've got installed, but I find firefox frequently freezing up for a few seconds while scrolling though a webpage. Hopefully the Firefox 4 series will do more to identify misbehaving addons and generally improving performance.

[baius]

Not a lot is said in the Hexus preview about CSS 3.0 support. I'll have to look through the Mozilla site. Isn't CSS3, along with HTML5 meant to be the next big thing(s) for the WWW?