BathOS: We've heard of it. Your mobile phone works while you are bathing
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Firefox 4 plans are unveiled
GREAT PLANS for a speedier and more powerful version of Firefox have been unveiled.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox development, gave an online presentation about the development plans for Firefox 4.
In his talk to the Mozilla community, Beltzner said that his team is focused on three goals for Firefox 4. He wants Firefox to be "super-duper fast", support open standard web technologies like HTML5 and give users full control of data, the browser and web access.
Confusingly, while Firefox 3.6 was the last big release and 3.7 had been expected this summer, now 3.7 will be released as 3.64 while Firefox 4.0 will be, well, still called 4.0. Got that?
Beltzner didn't directly address why the iteration changes were made but did say he prefers working with open accountability.
"We work in the open, socialising our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community," he said.
The development team has projected the final release date of Firefox 4.0 for November but said it is subject to change. The first Beta will be out in June with a release candidate expected in October. µ
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I guess we will ave to wait for May 19-20 Google I/O conference then. Reading a bit more there seems to be high chance Google will open source VP8.
Current Firefox HTML5 supported OGG Theora (which is based on VP3) can not compare to H.264 in terms of quality.
a built in flash blocker! The most important feature to me for a browser.
I haven't seen any evidence of memory leaks for many months - maybe a year or more. I always run the latest version of Firefox (and at present I'm running 3.6.4 beta - but only because it is rock solid). Windows 7, 64-bit.
Usually I fire up Firefox when I log in and leave it up all day - occasionally for two or three days before rebooting. Currently my peak working set is about 240MB. With RAM costing what it does (I have 6GB, but rarely use more than half) that's not a consideration AFAIAC,
I run Firefox on two different Linux distros and three different XP installations, one of which has only got 512MB of memory. I've haven't seen any memory leaks for a year or more.
I wonder what you're doing differently..... Have you reported your bug?
@j they won't support h.264 because it has copyrighted technology, and although the owners 'promised' they would not enforce any right the coming 5 years it makes mozilla's team decide against using it, they are familiar with how that can backfire.
There was talk that google would release a new codec for HTML5 into open source though, and if they do that might have quite an impact since that would then be acceptable for mozilla and presumably used for youtube/google-video and soon after by others.
We'll know more in 2 weeks apparently.
Any mention of what they'll remove this time? Because every new version they sneakily remove a useful feature, it's like their version of an easter egg.
@BB, Chrome does support extensions....
I could not care less about HTML 5 or whatever, fix your damn memory leaks Mozilla. I shouldn't have to periodically exit Firefox every few hours because your damn browser uses up a gigabyte of physical memory. Even that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the periodic momentary pauses that occur when memory usage reaches that point. This announcement better not mean I have to wait until November for a fix, if there is one.
If Google Chrome starts supporting extensions I am out of this browser. Hell, IE might even be worth switching to if this state of Firefox continues.
Still, I wonder what Mozilla will do about HTML 5 H.264 video support. Currently Firefox support only free OGG and while it's ummm....free, big players like Youtube seem to be moving towards H.264.
...They plan to do this by leveraging the the super fast, standard's compliant webkit renderer, and the new V8 JavaScript Engine.
The existing, painfully slow xulrunner framework will be dropped, and firefox will be recoded from xul with javascript events to machine-optimised code.
Finally - a new, simpler extension framework will be implemented using javascript, that will no longer drag the interface down with extra toolbars, status bar icons, side bars, extra menu items, right click options and popup dialogs. Extensions will be simple and "just work".
Firefox 4.0 - codename "Krome" is due for release in the first quarter of 2011 and marks what they feel is a massive step forward in usability, and what should hopefully be the internet as a whole.