Firefox 4 release slips to 2011

robinbredin · 28 Oct 2010 at 14:24

Mozilla has pushed back the planned Firefox 4 release to 2011, a delay that's no surprise given the difficulties releasing the first full-featured beta of the open-source browser but that gives breathing room for several competitors. Just in time for IE9 release, me thinks.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20021005-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz13exDPznO

SiriusB · 28 Oct 2010 at 14:53

Not really surprised. I also agree it gives IE9 an advantage if MS get it out sooner.

Ko0lHaNDLuKe · 28 Oct 2010 at 14:59

The beta 6 is basically the finished thing, except some of my add-ons don't work. But it does just give IE and Chrome the initiative to keep gaining market share, as most people will obviously wait for the stable version of Firefox.

Fillado · 28 Oct 2010 at 15:52

I've had plenty of trouble with beta 6 so it's certainly not the "finished thing". Heck according to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta they haven't even done the feature freeze yet.

Quite frankly something needs to change at Mozilla. They were once the guys that brought new features and pushed development compared to IE. Now it's Google Chrome's insane development pace that is making Chrome the ones who are bringing new features and pushing development with Firefox stagnating.

theheyes · 28 Oct 2010 at 17:06

Has Firefox peaked? They seem to have dropped the ball at around the same time competition started hotting up. I used to use Firefox simply because it wasn't IE6 - now I don't use it at all.

It's not the fastest, it's not the most secure and it doesn't offer anything compelling for someone who isn't bothered about extensions imo, which is a shame because I liked it for years.

dante6491 · 28 Oct 2010 at 18:34

Ko0lHaNDLuKe said:
The beta 6 is basically the finished thing, except some of my add-ons don't work. But it does just give IE and Chrome the initiative to keep gaining market share, as most people will obviously wait for the stable version of Firefox.

Not quite true. B7 is adding the new java engine and a quite a bit more from what I read.

Also B7 is going to be the code freeze version. Anything that isn't added or fulling working will go into later releases.

Moeks · 28 Oct 2010 at 20:03

The ony major objection I have to Chrome is that Adblock does not function 'properly' ...in other words there is no really easy and simple to totally block most adverts, the Chrome one can't operate in the same way as it can't access Chrome in the same way, thus it just 'hides' the adds, that's sloppy really and no substitute for totally blocking them. I've been a Firefox user since shortly after in launched and I will continue to be, I do like Chrome, there is a lot to like about really, but the lack of proper adblocking function or addon is what really stops me being able to use it full time.

I'm looking forward to Firefox 4.

Fillado · 29 Oct 2010 at 08:13

Actually AdBlock for Chrome now behaves like Adblock Plus for Firefox - not even downloading the ads.

Adblock Plus is still far better though.

Ko0lHaNDLuKe · 29 Oct 2010 at 10:09

Fillado said:
I've had plenty of trouble with beta 6 so it's certainly not the "finished thing".

I don't think I've had a single crash with beta 6, however, I did only start using it a while ago so perhaps this version is a lot more stable than previous ones...

Also, you have to give Mozilla some credit as Google is a vastly bigger company with (I would think) at least 10x the amount of people working on Chrome than Mozilla has working on Firefox.

haz_pro · 29 Oct 2010 at 11:02

Not sure what version i have of firefox but all i have is problems with it hogging system resources and crashing at the moment.

Think when im going to give chrome another try.

Fillado · 29 Oct 2010 at 12:38

Ko0lHaNDLuKe said:
I don't think I've had a single crash with beta 6, however, I did only start using it a while ago so perhaps this version is a lot more stable than previous ones...

Also, you have to give Mozilla some credit as Google is a vastly bigger company with (I would think) at least 10x the amount of people working on Chrome than Mozilla has working on Firefox.

To give you an idea (using figures from Wikipedia which I assume are the latest available):

Opera is pretty rapid with development and has 757 employees and (using current exchange rates) $15,190,427 net income (2008).

Mozilla Corporation has 250+ employees with $41,802,867 net income (2007)

If Opera can hire that many people (considering Opera work on much more than the desktop browser alone) with much less income and do the development they do I'm sure Mozilla can do it as well.

My only theory is that Mozilla being so commited to Open Source - in both open development of the product and the open source nature of the end product - is what is bringing things to a crawl.

But Mozilla are just slow. Plain and simple. To put it in the most crazy terms possible:

September 14 is when Firefox 4 Beta 6 came out. They say the RC will be out in early 2011. So let's say middle of January the full stable Firefox 4 comes out which is probably optimistic.

In that time Google will have pushed out 3 stable releases of Chrome.

Mp4 · 29 Oct 2010 at 13:10

So is Chrome/IE the future again then? I currently use FF and have had no issues with it what so ever

Kainz · 29 Oct 2010 at 15:42

Believe it or not I've been using FF from day one and have never ever had a single issue with the browser bar the odd sluggish memory hog release back during the firebird days. It's been an amazing browser to use through the years.

I do agree that FF may have peaked though. Chrome seems to be blazing ahead in many areas whilst Mozilla seem to be adding tweaks here and there, some of which are pointless i.e Persona's. It's like they've lost touch and got derailed somehow. Each new release used to be greeted with cheers and now no-one really bats an eyelid.

I am tempted to move to Chrome but I feel that it isn't upto scratch on the extensions front yet. Adblock for one, which obviously no one can be without.

Speedwise FF is still as fast as it has always been and I pay little attention to the memory hogging aspects of the browser - as long as it doesn't impact my system.

MR.B · 30 Oct 2010 at 10:05

It's embarrassing that the first BETA of IE9 feels more polished, complete, and has less bugs than FF BETA 6.

From all the browsers i've tried (i'm a website designer) IE9 has the best GPU acceleration. The smoothest and highest GPU performance. And finally it's rendering all my work correctly and has decent HTML5 support, plus some of the best JS speed performance out there. It also now supports proper extensions, but obviously it will be some time before they start appearing in decent numbers but i might switch to it when Adblock-like extensions appear.

Chrome also now supports proper extensions and is my main browser because of this, theres already tons of extensions for it including a real Adblock that works like FF's. So to all the others commenting on Adblock for Chrome about it not working like FF's does - use the newest Chrome BETA version, and get Adblock here.
This was the only real reason most people were/are sticking to FF - Extensions. But now that other browsers like Chrome support this, which are also faster and more secure, theres really no reason to use FF anymore.

NathanE · 30 Oct 2010 at 11:10

Does this mean FF is going to ship hardware acceleration AFTER Microsoft does? Because not long ago they made it pretty damn clear in a blog post that they would beat MS by a country mile.

Fillado · 30 Oct 2010 at 17:08

Well this shows just how far Mozilla have been lagging but also the speed of Firefox 4 once beta 7 comes out:

zzzJonny · 31 Oct 2010 at 01:58

Fillado said:
Well this shows just how far Mozilla have been lagging but also the speed of Firefox 4 once beta 7 comes out:

I think the point of the graph is to show that sunspider isn't a useful benchmark since there's nothing between the latest versions of the major browsers.

Plus, Mozilla are so slow with the releases. I'm pretty sure their original plans were to have already had Firefox 4 out with more features a few months ago.

Mattus · 1 Nov 2010 at 00:07

MR.B said:
It's embarrassing that the first BETA of IE9 feels more polished, complete, and has less bugs than FF BETA 6

Fillado said:
In that time Google will have pushed out 3 stable releases of Chrome.

The problem with these statements is that we're comparing three organisations with completely different development cycles.

Mozilla releases lots of betas, aiming for one every couple of weeks and adding features as they go along. Microsoft will only release one or two betas, because they waited until the browser was just about feature complete before releasing any (remember that there've been 6 'preview' releases as well - none of which contained any form of UI). Google doesn't bother with milestone releases at all, and just pushes out really frequent automatic updates with minor changes and cryptic version numbers.

I do agree that Mozilla has been caught napping a bit. But Google releasing Chrome faster doesn't mean that they're developing it faster. Which significant new features have there been in Chrome 8? 7? 6? From a 'traditional' standpoint, Chrome version numbers are meaningless. Because they've committed to a release cycle based on time rather than features, you can guarantee that a lot of Chrome releases won't contain anything substantial.

This was the only real reason most people were/are sticking to FF - Extensions. But now that other browsers like Chrome support this, which are also faster and more secure, theres really no reason to use FF anymore.

Yes, you can use Adblock now. But you'll be waiting a long time for a Chrome release of Firebug or DownThemAll, for instance. Chrome's extension model is very limited compared to Firefox's. It doesn't permit particularly advanced extensions.

MR.B · 1 Nov 2010 at 10:49

I agree with what you're saying Mattus, and you're right about Chrome, but when i said "It's embarrassing that the first BETA of IE9 feels more polished, complete, and has less bugs than FF BETA 6"
I meant that Mozilla should not be releasing public BETA's of such poor quality. These BETA's of theres seem more like Alpha builds, they shouldn't be available to the public so readily with this level of features missing and this many bugs. Not only does it make Mozilla look bad, but loads of computer illiterate people seem to be downloading them and having all kinds of problems.

Mattus · 1 Nov 2010 at 15:39

Maybe Mozilla should make it more obvious that their betas are pre-release software that probably contains bugs, and that people who aren't willing to troubleshoot bugs should wait for the stable release. Open-source developers don't always have the customer-oriented mentality of companies who release commercial software for profit.

Having said that, Google hasn't helped by leaving the word 'beta' all over products like GMail for years on end. The result is that 'beta' now means 'this is finished, but we're not taking responsibility for any problems with it'. So when people download true 'beta' software, they expect something pretty polished rather than something which still has obvious bugs.