Firefox 8 RC out, Release on Monday

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

You can expect better performance as well as some UI changes. New extensions also need user permission to run (the first time.)

 

RC or beta? "Download Firefox Beta" There's usually a fair bit of difference, unless I'm not taking the rapid recombobulation cycle into account or something ...

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-8-beta-release-candidate,13902.html

 

I stand corrected.

 

An underwhelming release. But so was Chrome 15.

 

To be honest, as long as my extensions work & it's every bit as good as Fx 7, it's OK. It's just bloody hard work keeping three computers & several portables up to date! Oh for the days when there were entire months between releases. Opera is starting to look really good at the moment, the portable is very good, & I'm not having to upgrade the damn thing too often.

 

Lol, how quickly you forget all the bugs in Opera, and the fact that the extensions (many of them, not all) are about as operable as the Chrome ones before the API change Besides, you want to complain about updates? Try running Firefox Nightly for a couple of weeks! It goes with the territory, but it truly is a pain.

 

Well ... I've found a workaround for the buggy favicon bar (I don't use it any more).

Oh ... I haven't forgotten about those bugs & extension problems , I try to use the extensions that work better. The portable has enough upsides to counter-act the buggy stuff if I use some workarounds. The browser launches much faster without that favicon toolbar anyhow, especially the portable. It's not a bad back-up for my portable Firefox. I'm going to keep telling myself that ...

I'll think I'll leave you brave 'The Right Stuff' cybernauts to test pilot the nightlys, us lesser mortals just don't have what it takes.

 

Lol I'm actually surprised ABP and NoScript continue to work with Nightly sometimes updating twice a day. Opera is a fast, very nice looking browser, and I wish it and its extensions worked much better than they do. Unfortunately, with all the hullabaloo going on internally, you might want to grab a few brews and sit a while.

 

I'm pretty sure ABP & NS will be OK for Fx 8 on Monday. Of course, if that's Monday Californian time, I'm not actually sure how that translates into GMT. Probably early Tuesday morning. I should have guessed a new Fx was coming as I have had a load of extension updates the past two days. I'm fairly certain there will be a SeaMonkey upgrade (SM 2.5) within a couple of days as well.

It's got some nice skins & a lot of very good ideas. It can be nicely customised & they've even fixed some of the bugs that were particularly 'bugging' me. I can set it for 'UK English' now & it stays that way even after a re-launch! I just find it hard to look at 'customise' spelt with a 'z' LOL. If it worked properly it would give Firefox a run for its money, & probably knock the rather spartan Chrome into a cocked hat, as they say. I have had a few problems with Chrome portable & was never that impressed with its performance. It's always good to have back-up, especially with portables. Even if it has to be Opera.

Well, the appreciation of real ales is my other hobby.

 

final version here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/8.0/win32/en-US/

 

What's the #$@¨% CHANGELOG?

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-8-beta-release-candidate,13902.html

not a lot, seemingly UI stuff

 

The date, according to Mozilla, is here.

Of course, there are more authoritative sources available

Also on the same page:
Note: the Beta, Aurora and Nightly dates are code merge dates, not release dates.

But this is the time bloggers and "tech sites" really come into their own with scoops of -your_favorite_here-.

 

No word about progress on the MemShrink project. Should I conclude that version 8 won't introduce further improvements on that area?

I hate to be on the dark like this. Google Chrome team is much more clear/open with its Google Chrome Releases blog.

 

Doesn't look like V8 has a hell of a lot to change.

 

It has crashed on me 4 times today. Not the change I had hoped for.

 

I'm surprised so little change could even cause crashes.

 

You'll definitely be waiting on silent upgrades..which is one of the things they need to get done ASAP.

Edit: As an FYI, silent updates is scheduled for v10, but as of yet is not implemented (as of 10.0a1, 11-05-11).

 

If electrolysis ever gets done I'll switch back (unless Chrome comes out with something.) I just hate the direction Chrome is going in.

 

Wait, did I just see you type that? In all seriousness, what's going on with Chrome that you're not liking?

 

I think the most recent (and biggest) is the multiple profiles issue.

This is idiotic. This isn't just a simple feature that can cause issues it's practically designed to cause issues. The entire purpose of multiple profiles is to bring ALL information onto multiple computers. Not just passwords even, EVERYTHING.

This is really disappointing. Obviously if you are sharing a computer with multiple people locking is not a possibility.

I also believe that extensions are attack vectors. I think it's likely we'll see exploits in common extensions (adblock plus is used by something like 300,000 people on chrome alone I believe?) and we'll probably see malicious extensions as well. Chrome could take simple measures to prevent this but they won't.

Chrome 13 was really the last release that meant anything. 14 and 15 have not added much at all - there's that one "big" thing that gets into each version but that's it.

Native client's another thing. Google needs to get it into their heads - they've already changed the entire browser game, that's enough, chill out. NaCli probably isn't going anywhere, I can't say without knowing more about programming with it. Either way, software that can only run on a single OS (silverlight) is never popular, imagine software limited to a browser. All Mozilla has to do to kill NaCli off is simply not support it. You know Safari/IE aren't going to unless it somehow picks up a huge amount. It's basically ActiveX without the glaring security holes.


I'm using Chrome because in the short time it's been around it's blasted ahead of everyone else but now Firefox is catching up and Chrome is wasting time on detrimental updates.

They should focus more on securing and generally improving their extensions and improving performance.

Prerender from omnibox is the last feature in Chrome that's really impressed me and it's still in about:flags. Features like that are what Chrome started out with and they made it the browser that "felt" the fastest by far.

IMO Chrome could easily be the best if they did a few things:
1) Secure multiple profiles - it's a great idea but it's a horrible execution.
2) 64bit - Security and performance improvements.
3) Extend the extensions API - self explanatory I think.
4) Heuristics in the web-store. This would remove 90% vulnerabilities.
5) Work on more features like prerender from omnibox.

 

I agree with you on multiple things. I've only in the last day or so heard about the profiles issue, and no, it doesn't look all that thrilling. I definitely agree that Chrome is still very lax in checking/securing their add-ons..and I don't understand why. I will say that malicious extensions are going to happen regardless, but Firefox is taking an extra step, come version 8, in regards to 3rd party ones. Chrome..well, not so much from what I continually see from them.

I know I've said it enough times to probably make you roll your eyes, lol, but I'm just never that impressed with their additional "features". Yes, searching is faster, yes, loading pages can be sped up (unless you land on a page that is in the lower ring of Javascript Hell). But, everything they put in there seems to go towards benefiting their search engine and, honestly, really only speeding up their own pages. I'm sure you and I will disagree a bit there, as I know speed is very important to you and is also a very individual thing.

I do wonder why some of the available options still require going into flags. Don't they trust their own features? A few have been in several releases and are still treated as "experimental". It seems to me that they've concentrated so hard on speed, that they've ignored everything else (overall security being the exception). And, what they have added aside from speed, they don't seem to really care all that much about.

I wonder if they're just "getting comfortable", you know what I mean?

 

Firefox has long put its extensions through a vetting process. It isn't foolproof but it's legitimate and it's there. Chrome does virtually nothing - there's a "verified publisher" kinda thing. That's it. They could easily fix this with simple heuristics checks or just do what Firefox does.

I do disagree. Yes, they absolutely do do a lot to speed up their own pages. SPDY is one example of that. SPDY is also open source and anyone can implement it.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/11/2x-faster-web.html

Prefetching is gonna effect every page you type into the omnibox, that's a big deal for me.

Heavy Javascript has also typically been Chrome's strongpoint. Same with HTML5. When they implemented Linux in Javascript Chrome was the best browser for it. Same with the gameboy emulator, or this old pacman thing I saw a year or so ago.

Whether there motivations are to get Google apps working as fast as possible or not the end result is every page being faster.

A lot of them legitimately are experimental and broken, others sometimes get pulled later. Something like "experimental extensions api" will always be there because it'll always refer to that API.

The XSS auditor was in there since 11 I believe and implemented in 13.

I think the issue is in fact that they're comfortable. They really had to break through to get to Firefox's market share. They did it well. In 3 years they've caught up and it's because they've legitimately made a great product.

Now that they're kinda... caught up it seems like they're just playing around with new ideaas.

IDK. I see how the browser's been changing in the past few months and I have no liked it.

If Firefox 10 had electrolysis in it right now I'd seriously consider switching.

 

Well, even the plugin container helps quite a bit. I mean, in my experience, crashes tend to come from Flash/Java plugins anyway, at least with more recent Firefox versions. Of course, going "all the way" and isolating each tab not just for crashing, but as a security measure, is probably a long, long way off if it ever happens.

For that kind of security, I'm afraid we're basically stuck with Chrome/IE. On the other hand, if you're still running Sandboxie, EMET and such, you'd very much likely be alright without it in Firefox, of course that's my opinion. I know you're not fond of 3rd party fixes, and I understand, but it's something to consider anyway if Chrome is just not doing it for you these days. Btw, of course they play around with ideas. These are the people that brought us Labs, lol. I actually think the greater percentage of what they do is experiment with stuff, lol.