Mozilla release first beta of Firefox 4.0 for MacMozilla release first beta of Firefox 4.0 for Mac w
Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday released the first external beta of Firefox 4.0 for Mac users, the latest version of the firm's popular web browser built atop its new Gecko 2.0 layout engine.
The 20.2MB update introduces crash protection that kicks in when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins, allowing users to continue their browsing session unfettered.
It also delivers a new Addons Manager and extension management API, WebSockets support, a new HTML 5 parser, a Web Console analysis tool, native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format, and more responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
Cosmetically, Firefox 4 jettisons the individual stop and reload buttons for a single unified button, replaces the Bookmarks Bar with a Bookmarks Button, and places tabs at the very top of the browser window in a newly designed interface theme.
The latter change isn't fully implemented in the Mac distribution just yet, however, as the development team continues to work on the Mac theme. "Although you can customize Firefox to show tabs on top for OSX, it really doesn't look good," the team said in a set of release notes. "We suggest you wait."
Other changes include partial support for CSS Transitions, full WebGL support (currently disabled), support for more HTML5 form controls, and a Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X.
Moving forward in the beta process, Mozilla promises more advanced privacy controls, hardware graphics acceleration, more asynchronous I/O, JavaScript performance optimizations, and the ability to synchronize settings, passwords, bookmarks, history, open tabs and other customizations across multiple devices "so you can take Firefox with you wherever you go."
According to NetApplications, Firefox remains the world's second most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer, commanding roughly a quarter of the market, give or take a percentage over the past six months. It's followed by Google's Chrome at just over 7% share and Safari at just under 5% share.
The 20.2MB update introduces crash protection that kicks in when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins, allowing users to continue their browsing session unfettered.
It also delivers a new Addons Manager and extension management API, WebSockets support, a new HTML 5 parser, a Web Console analysis tool, native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format, and more responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
Cosmetically, Firefox 4 jettisons the individual stop and reload buttons for a single unified button, replaces the Bookmarks Bar with a Bookmarks Button, and places tabs at the very top of the browser window in a newly designed interface theme.
The latter change isn't fully implemented in the Mac distribution just yet, however, as the development team continues to work on the Mac theme. "Although you can customize Firefox to show tabs on top for OSX, it really doesn't look good," the team said in a set of release notes. "We suggest you wait."
Other changes include partial support for CSS Transitions, full WebGL support (currently disabled), support for more HTML5 form controls, and a Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X.
Moving forward in the beta process, Mozilla promises more advanced privacy controls, hardware graphics acceleration, more asynchronous I/O, JavaScript performance optimizations, and the ability to synchronize settings, passwords, bookmarks, history, open tabs and other customizations across multiple devices "so you can take Firefox with you wherever you go."
According to NetApplications, Firefox remains the world's second most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer, commanding roughly a quarter of the market, give or take a percentage over the past six months. It's followed by Google's Chrome at just over 7% share and Safari at just under 5% share.
Comments
Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday released the first external beta of Firefox 4.0 for Mac users, the latest version of the firm's popular web browser built atop its new Gecko 2.0 layout engine....
Colour me unimpressed. It's slow and slightly jerky on my computer, and doesn't seem to be very customisable for a browser that's always calling out Safari for the same thing.
Colour me unimpressed. It's slow and slightly jerky on my computer, and doesn't seem to be very customisable for a browser that's always calling out Safari for the same thing.
I have only read about people saying Safari extension API is not as robust as the FF Add-Ons.
Colour me unimpressed. It's slow and slightly jerky on my computer, and doesn't seem to be very customisable for a browser that's always calling out Safari for the same thing.
Did you read the ?first beta? part?
I’m glad to see Mozilla working again but they still need to step up their game. At their current rate Windows 9 will be more standards compliant, faster and more efficient than Firefox. The only thing they’ll have going for them is extensions but with Chrome being such a thorn in their side as it is it’s not looking too good for the Firefox’s future growth.
I know you meant IE9 but interestingly, today I got my MSDN Flash newsletter email where MS was promoting HTML 5 and of all things, the canvas tag through a software product known as F# by WebSharper, however I was unable to get on their website, intellifactory.com, as it apparently crashed due to the publicity. Somehow I get the feeling that MS is going to try to hijack the canvas tag because their code is slightly out of sync (wrong context usage) compared with Mozilla or Apple's version. Which is also a bit of a problem since Mozilla and Apple implement the tag differently as well.
I know you meant IE9 but interestingly, today I got my MSDN Flash newsletter email where MS was promoting HTML 5 and of all things, the canvas tag through a software product known as F# by WebSharper, however I was unable to get on their website, intellifactory.com, as it apparently crashed due to the publicity. Somehow I get the feeling that MS is going to try to hijack the canvas tag because their code is slightly out of context with Apple's version.
I posted a comment (link below) on the most recent Safari 5 article thread the other day. Interestingly, I was pretty much called an IE fanboy for it. For those not going to the link, IE9 is up to 83/100 on Acid3, but more importantly it’s the first browser to offer HW Acceleration to the HTML5 Canvas element, which (as I’m sure you know, mstone) is critical if Canvas ever wants to make an impact on the web outside of proof-of-concept demos.
which (as I?m sure you know, mstone) is critical if Canvas every wants to make an impact on the web outside of proof-of-concept demos.
I may be critical but I'm spending tons of hours getting my canvas chops up to speed. One thing I recently discovered is that the transform function does not allow a simple perspective. You can skew, rotate, scale and move an element but it would be really nice to reshape a rectangle into a trapezoid. I suppose that will come with context(3D). There are plenty of other complaints as well but one needs to know all the specifications and features of a implementation before one can criticize it.
Anyway with that said I can see a lot of promise for Firefox 4.
I'd rather have my bookmarks bar.
I agree completely. The bookmark bar has been highly useful for me and having fast access to sites that I frequently visit
i hate the unified stop and reload buttons. that's one of the reasons i still use firefox over chrome or safari despite firefox's performance inferiority.
a stop button takes up what, 20 horizontal pixels? half the time i go to press stop on safari the page finishes loading and i end up hitting refresh.
at least it's inevitable that someone will make an extension to correct these problems. or maybe this kind of thing won't make it to release, like the terrible safari interface changes where the tabs were like chrome, but worse.
Zzzz . . . they still make Firefox?
Help kill Adobe's Flash. Join YouTube's HTML5 beta and on Vimeo just click the "Switch to HTML5 player" link below any video. http://www.youtube.com/html5
They do.
Question for you. How do we go about killing Quicktime as well?
Flash is used for a bunch of stuff outside of video and HTML5 isn't quite at a point yet to totally replace it, so I can at least understand why people are trying to hang onto it.
As far as I can tell the Quicktime plug-in is redundant and worthless.
The fact that I need to have 7 plug-ins installed to simply watch video on the Apple website is beyond a joke. If it was any other company it would be understandable but Apple have made a point about being forward-thinking and standards focused.
Apple should be leading the pack and showing others companies how video on a website should be delivered.
I'd actually be happier with an error stating "You must have a HTML5 compliant browser to view this video - download safari *here*" than the "You must have the Quicktime plug-in installed to view this video" error display that currently exists.
So my question to you and to everyone else is... can I opt-in to a HTML5 beta on the Apple website? If so, how do I do it?
Zzzz . . . they still make Firefox?
I, for one, am glad that they do. Even with the Firefox 4 Beta I can log into my bank's website, unlike with Safari 5. With Safari 4 there was no issue, but now I have to switch to another browser in order to do online banking.
Question for you. How do we go about killing Quicktime as well?
As far as I can tell the Quicktime plug-in is redundant and worthless.
QuickTime, for me, works great.
But I installed the FireFox 4 beta and, when I logged in at TDAmeritrade, I was given the following message, when I tried a couple of the features, indicating that FireFox 4 needs me to install a Java plug-in.
But I didn't have this problem with FireFox 3.66
Any suggestions?
more webkit, less gecko, please.
+10000