SillyDog701

[James]

Paul Thurrott had an amusing piece on this found here:

ttp://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul ... -2011.aspx

Firefox 4 Delayed Yet Again. No, Seriously
If you're looking for a company that is so plodding and slow, so utterly incapable of shipping product, one that actually makes Microsoft look spry and speedy by comparison, please look no further than Mozilla. This is a company that makes exactly one product: the Firefox web browser. And it cannot for the life of it ship new versions of this product, ever. In fact, if I were to characterize this company with a single word, one that applies to its entire existence, that word would be "delay." This is a company that sets up schedules only to miss them by miles. It routinely—no, not routinely, but more frequently than that—establishes some pointless series of milestones and then wastes further time by rescheduling them after they've missed 'em all. These people are incapable of doing the one thing they do, in other words. And it has reached ludicrous and comical proportions with Firefox 4, the would-be latest version of this browser. This week, the company announced that it was delaying the release of Firefox 4 for what has to be the 127th time, and is adding an unprecedented 12th—yes, twelfth—beta release to the product's schedule. Seriously, figure out how to ship product or get into another business. This is beyond embarrassing

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)

[Fulvio]

James,
what would you do, if you had a product which is trying to be different enough from the previous one?
Would you release it, just because you had a timetable. And, remember that Microsoft is a company which tries to make money. They release a product, and, then, release update after update. Mozilla Firefox takes inputs from a lot of people.
I have not tried a new FF 4, but I will check it out. If there is an update, it comes out with Release Notes which tell you what is new and different. Nine times out of ten, I don't have a clue about what's different. But, I don't care. I don't rely on a new version.
And, I can, always, complain, and they listen. I did have an exchange with users and developers about Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.7, entitled "Thunderbird 3.1.x is a bug".

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13

[James]

Fulvio, I think that Thurrott has something to say worth listening to. What I would do is irrelevant. The point is... Firefox has become a plodding, bloated program that takes forever to open on my machine and consequently I've pretty much dumped it (at least for the time being). Opera, IE9, Safari and Chrome are all better at loading and rendering pages than Firefox. When (and if) version 4 finally becomes available, I'll take another look.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)

[Fulvio]

I read the comment on the same issue, in PC World, and, they say that among other things

Many of the holdbacks seem to be related to Flash and Hotmail.

.
I have an old and slow computer, and FF4 beta 10 open quite fast, although it takes, still, a lot of memory (164 MB with three Tabs open). Anyway beta 11 is supposed to be finished, but has not come out.
Have you read about the Prospector addon?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b10) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b10

[James]

Very interesting. I had not heard about this new feature. I'm not sure what to think about it at this juncture.

UserAgent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01

[Mandrake]

They may as well take the time to get Firefox 4 right, to nab all the bugs and so forth. That said, I've found the beta to be quite stable.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11

[DJGM]

That Prospector concept is something I was worried that at least one browser maker would consider
introducing at some point. By removing all elements of the browser UI to be left with a completely
chromeless content display area is dumbing sown taken to absolute extremes, and I do hope this
particular is entirely discouraged from being officially introduced to browsers on the desktop.

I took a look at one of the concept videos on the Prospector site at Mozilla. The browser GUI had
morphed into a seriously bad knock off of the Dashboard and Expose features of Mac OS X, and
to be brutally honest, it looked utterly dreadful, with what would normally be displayed in tabs,
reduced to a mess of postage stamps strewn all over a dimmed out content display area.


As for the original argument of Mozilla taking too long to finalize and release Firefox 4, I entirely
but respectfully disagree. Mozilla policy over releases has always been based on "we'll release it,
when it is ready", and I for one, fully support that particularly sensible policy.

Or, would you rather Mozilla rush-release an unfinished product chock full of unresolved bugs?
Lest we forget ... the rush release of the fiasco that was Netscape 6 over 10 years ago . . .

Chrome is the current prime example of a rush released and essentially incomplete product.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101123 (like Firefox/3.5.x) SeaMonkey/2.0.10

[Fulvio]

I brought up the issue about Prospector , without checking if it was worthwhile. Thanks for your input .
as for

Chrome is the current prime example of a rush released and essentially incomplete product.

it has had innumerable updates. I, surely, do not want it that way. I, rather wait.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13

[James]

To each, his own. Numbers also speak volumes and Chrome has a far greater user base than Seamonkey. That's not to denigrate SM. For those who want a suite, I suppose it's as good as any other (i.e. Opera). We each must choose what we believe is best for us. I certainly don't find Chrome to be "essentially incomplete" and according to Net Application, as of January 2011 Chrome was the third most widely used browser having passed the 10% worldwide usage share of web browsers.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.20 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.672.2 Safari/534.20

[DJGM]

Chrome has a much larger userbase than SeaMonkey, since it's a Google product, and has been
heavily advertised and promoted to a level comparable to that of Firefox about 6 years ago.

Meanwhile, SeaMonkey is more of a community based project, with a more cult following than
a populist one. Bear in mind, while it's not an official Mozilla product unlike the old app-suite
it replaced, it's a project that's still fully backed and endorsed by Mozilla, with the bulk of
the development work done by Mozilla and it's worldwide band of open source volunteers.

As long as Firefox is still an actively developed product, so too shall SeaMonkey, albeit at
a slower pace, with fewer developers working on the front end than it's Firefox sibling.

With it all being open source, there's nothing really to stop SeaMonkey continuing even if
all of a sudden Mozilla went the way of the dodo, although it's long-term future could be
placed in doubt. Also, regardless of the continued backing (or not) from Mozilla, there
is also nothing really to stop someone creating a fork of SeaMonkey being built upon
the WebKit engine instead of Gecko, although such a spin-off wouldn't be allowed to
use the name "SeaMonkey" as Mozilla have all legal rights to it.

I actually wouldn't mind a WebKit based spin-off of SeaMonkey. As long as it supports
at least some of the most popular Mozilla and Chrome extensions, I'd certainly use it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.17) Gecko/20110123 (like Firefox/3.x) SeaMonkey/2.0.12

[richard mitnick]

I got bored so I tried both the FF4 beta (12?) and the IE9 RC. I tried FF4 on all of my machines but for reasons below removed it from all but one.

The FF browser worked fine, but, as it is a beta, it was missing a couple things upon which I depend: Colorful Tabs, and the Mosaic-Fox theme. I know that if and as these become available, they will automatically update.
So, right now, the only machine which has the FF4 beta is my handy dandy really good, cool, fast, new Eee PC netbook, which I bought specifically to test things like these new browsers and wireless speeds around my house. I open the beta once in the morning and once in the evening to check on updates.

Once those two items are available, I will load FF4 on all of my machines.

IE9 is another story. In the RC, it is just too dark. It is hard to see the tabs. So, it is going to wait a bit longer.

But, on all my machines, FF4 was way faster than IE9 RC.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 ImageShackToolbar/5.2.4 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)

[DJGM]

All those impatiently waiting for Firefox 4 should be glad to know that there are absolutely
no more betas planned, and the first release candidate builds are now being prepared.
Since there's been so many betas, I doub't there'll be more than one RC.

Chances are, now there are no more "hard blocker" bugs, the RC might be elevated to
become the finalised version, as has happened with previous major Ffx releases.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.17) Gecko/20110123 (like Firefox/3.x) SeaMonkey/2.0.12