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Firefox Friday -- "Beta 2 is coming, and it'll break stuff" edition
As Sebastian jaunts around Montenegro snapping photos, the task has fallen to me to cover this week's spate of Firefox news... So grab your stuffed Foxkeh and pull up a chair -- it's time for the Friday Five!Firefox 4 Beta 2 is coming soon (as in today, maybe)!
... Which is great news! I've been using Firefox 4 for my primary browser since the first beta builds showed up on the Mozilla nightly servers. It's fast and as customizable as it ever was, and Sebastian even discovered that its hardware acceleration performance was right up there with Internet Explorer 9's.
Beta 2 was actually slated for release today, but the download page is still serving up b1. When it's ready, you'll find Firefox 4 beta 2 at getfirefox.com/beta/.
As with many good changes, however, all the improvements in Firefox 4 can't come with some kind of trade off... Right?
NSFW [language] musical interlude about breakage -- courtesy Limp Bizkit and YouTube user Dave Niemela
Related: FF4 beta 2 is going to break a ton of extensions.
Over at CyberNet, Ryan Wagner ran an interesting post earlier this week about an important change to the Firefox 4b2 internals. The change is part of the Gecko 2.0 engine, and it affects the way XPCOM components are registered by Firefox. While this change is a good thing -- it'll help with multithreading and (hopefully) no-restart extension installs -- it's going to cripple a lot of extensions.
While no one wants to hear that his or her favorite extensions may not work, Wagner also posted some encouraging news. The changes required to his CyberSearch add-on only took 30 minutes to code -- so any extensions you use which are actively maintained will probably be fixed up in short order.
Wagner feels the change is undeniably good, however, saying "...it's better in the long run. Previously if you did anything with an extension (install, remove, enable, disable, etc...) you would have to restart your browser, and doing so would require ALL of your browser components to have to re-register. With the way it was set up every component would be loaded and executed, then unloaded, then reloaded again during the restart."
As for my (our?) hopes for no-restart installs? Not so fast, he says: "You'll still need to restart your browser after installing/updating extensions, but now the components are pulled directly out of the extension's manifest file which avoids many of the otherwise poor side effects." As of beta 2, then, it's safe to assume it's not going to happen.
Firefox Home for the iPhone keeps getting better!
One of our readers, Chad Tunis, noticed that Firefox Home [App Store link] had a rather serious hang-up. It seems all of his neatly-organized bookmarks which were hidden behind labels simply stayed hidden. Firefox Home displayed the labels, but wouldn't allow him to tap through to the actual bookmarks.
He wrote in asking if we'd heard of a solution, but we hadn't. Fortunately, however, I got a reply from Chad yesterday saying that Mozilla had fixed the bug and that his labels were all working 100%!
That's great news for any of you who run Firefox on your desktop and use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch for your mobile browsing. Mozilla is clearly intent on delivering the best experience they can on those devices (within Apple's restrictions, of course).
Also worth noting: Firefox Home is still one of the top 100 free apps in the App Store.... Woo! It's currently at #98, just a few behind *sigh* Free Sex Positions Decision Maker.
If you're already playing with Firefox 4, you probably aren't opposed to checking out experimental add-ons. That being the case, you really should check out TabCandy, an awesome little project Aza Raskin has been working away at. I recently shared a brief video of TabCandy in action -- but you really should give it a try yourself!
That's all for this week! Next week we'll be back with more Mozilla/FF news!
Comments
15
Subscribe to commentsOskarJul 23rd 2010 11:39AM
You forgot about retained layers, which improves Firefox performance in several areas, including fade effects, CSS transforms, and scrolling.
Which is pretty nice, because my blog (http://redfoxyhead.blogspot.com) with fixed image now scrolls nice (even better than Chrome) . And even on older (Athlon 2800+) the difference between beta 1 and beta 2 in scrolling is damn good.
Also there are AppTabs.
And 50ms better JS xD
Btw. there are few problems with retained layers and flash and that will be fixed in next beta which is aimed to be 2 weeks after beta 2 .
Atle IversenJul 23rd 2010 12:29PM
In other words, it is better to wait 1-2 weeks if you have a lot of extensions you rely on to give them a chance to update and catch up ?
Thanks for the warning...I'll try it later, then
RichardJul 23rd 2010 12:51PM
On the basis that you can reboot Firefox after extensions have been loaded with one button click, that it takes only a couple of seconds and all your tabs get restored back to where you were before - personally I'm not that worried about such functionality.
jsmorleyJul 23rd 2010 1:11PM
Yes, I agree. I think having addons install without a restart of the browser is fine, but hardly a huge deal. It takes like 3-5 seconds to restart and your session is restored.
jsmorleyJul 23rd 2010 1:11PM
I found that most extensions worked fine once you installed the "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003/
However, a few did not. Nothing I can't live without in the short term though. All you can do is use the above addon, enable all your existing extension and give them a try. Some will be fine, some may work but have cosmetic problems with the new chrome, and some won't work at all. Be sure to know how to run Firefox using the "firefox -safe-mode" command line, in case something really breaks it.
All this will be true to one extent or another in weeks and maybe months, depending on each addon author, so I'm not sure there is any real benefit to waiting unless you do find an incompatible addon you in fact can't live without.
P.S. If you use Personas, be prepared to live without them or without 4.0 for some time to come. They don't work correctly at this time (they cover up the Windows min/max/close buttons for instance) and from what I can gather on the firefox blog/forum where it is discussed, it is not a high priority to fix for a while give developer resources.
jsmorleyJul 23rd 2010 1:17PM
One last note. In my opinion, if you are going to use the beta versions of 4.0, you might want to consider using the "nightly builds" (Minefield) instead. There is some risk with any beta that it might not work right, and I admit there is added risk with the nightly builds, but my experience so far is that now that 4.0 is stable enough to have public builds to the level of b2/b3, the nightly builds have been very stable and reliable for weeks.
The disadvantage is some risk that "tomorrow's" build could have a real problem in it, (hasn't happened to me yet, but it's not tomorrow yet ) but the advantage is that bug fixes and improvements to functionality happen a lot faster than waiting weeks for the next real beta.
Give it a try by going to http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ and grab the version appropriate for you.
If you are going to use the nightly builds, Mozbackup is your friend... http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
Saint SeminoleJul 23rd 2010 1:12PM
No worries. I always wait a few weeks to update Firefox to the latest version, mainly because of the extensions.
Since extensions are the *only* reason I switched to (and stay with) Firefox in the first place, there's no point in surfing without them. Without extensions, Firefox is no different from most other browsers, at least for me.
jsmorleyJul 23rd 2010 1:26PM
Also true for me, but my pleasant experience has been that most of my addons worked just fine when enabled with the "Add-on Compatibility Reporter". There are so many extensions for Firefox that it is pointless to talk about what works and what doesn't, at any level of detail here, but in the category of "popular" ones that I bet many use:
AdBlock worked fine
Download StatusBar worked fine
FastDial worked fine
NewTab Homepage worked fine
StumbleUpon worked fine
AfterTheDeadline gave me issues
GMail Notifier gave me issues
QuckDrag gave me issues
Long and the short of it was that the ones I really can't or won't live without, AddBlock and FastDial for sure, worked ok. The others I can live without until they are updated.
SilverWaveJul 23rd 2010 2:38PM
On a more rational note...
I have Firefox 3.6 working perfectly so although I run both 3.6 and 4.0 it may be a while before I move to 4.0 if they start breaking extensions.
Emo1313Jul 23rd 2010 3:30PM
I am wholey uninterested in ff4 until at least most of the add-ons i use daily
work, until then. not gonna happen, it would put a serious dent in routine
jsmorleyJul 23rd 2010 3:29PM
Well, I for one accept that when you run a beta of any software which supports custom written addons, it is the responsibility of the addon author to ensure he/she stays current with the supporting application. I certainly don't want Firefox to bloat up with "compatibility" work around code or not implement a new feature or technology to ensure that an addon written for a previous version isn't "broken".
The options are clear:
1) Move now because you like the better performance and new features of 4.0 and are willing to live without some addons until they are updated. The key to this is whether there is a "broken" addon you just can't live without. If you like being on the "bleeding edge" and don't mind a little pain with your pleasure, this can be a good option. Not for everyone though.
2) Wait either for the release of 4.0, or at least until the majority of addons have been updated. You may wait forever for some though, many addon authors have a good idea, write an addon, move on and never look back. Still, this is a reasonable option for many if not most folks.
3) Just stay with Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever you have now. Nothing says you have to use the "latest and greatest". I pretty much always will, but that's me.
4) Stay on 3.x but comment on every post about 4.0 to bitch that "Firefox broke your favorite addon", which is pointless, ignorant, and well, stupid. The starting position of Mozilla is and should be that 4.0 will break EVERY addon, and that they will all need to be updated by the authors. This will turn out to not be entirely true, it already isn't, but it's the right way to approach it.
SilverWaveJul 24th 2010 3:58PM
eh NO.
The whole idea behind Jetpack is to stop this happening... it may be Firefox 5.0 before we get there but it is important.
Just think 4 maybe the last time Firefox development breaks an add-on!
William K.Jul 24th 2010 8:57PM
I love all these additions, i'm turning into a real fanboi for Firefox, however, there is one thing that hasn't been added that boggles my mind. Which it may be there and I may just be missing it.
Why can't you bookmark a site as an apptab, to where anytime you open that website again it will automatically be an apptab. :(
dougJul 27th 2010 4:55PM
Beta 2 for Firefox 4 is out today, just go to the link in the post, and you'll be able to get it.
DabblerJul 27th 2010 8:45PM
Why can't the developers at Mozilla find a way to connect extensions through a proxy or HAL so upgrades don't keep breaking extensions? If I didn't need extensions I would use Opera 9 or Chrome which are much faster. Since most extensions are free we can't expect extension developers to continue actively updating these once they have released them in the wild just because the kids at Mozilla have changed something under the hood.