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Mozilla has released the fourth beta for Firefox 4.0 on August 24th. This release is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended as a preview release for web application developers and the testing community.
New stuff in this release:
For more info see the release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 4. Next up is going to Beta 5 is due out in September.
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There are times depending on what is running in the background and other Internet activity that Firefox (or Thunderbird) may get bogged down and a JavaScript may take a little longer than normal to complete. Users will get a warning similar to the one below advising that the script is unresponsive. The reason for this is because the application thinks the script is running wild and never going to finish processing thus causing the application to freeze and/or crash. This is very similar to Windows Task Manager warning you that an application is not responding, but the application is just a bit bogged down (which commonly happens with JavaScript) and needs more time to finish what it is doing.
The ‘fix’ for this is fairly simple, just increase the amount of time before a script is considered ‘unresponsive’. This can be done in both Firefox and Thunderbird via about:config (Firefox) and the Config Editor… (Thunderbird):
Firefox
Thunderbird
Source: Itchy Hands
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The summer of 1995 we saw the release of Windows 95, which introduced the paradox of clicking ‘Start’ to turn-off your computer. But more importantly, that summer was also the release of Internet Explorer 1.0 which forever changed the way people accessed the Internet. Yes, there was the Netscape browser but in 1995 the Internet access was still fairly ‘controlled’ by online providers such as AOL which offered a “walled-off version of the Internet.” Internet Explorer was the biggest success for Microsoft, especially when IE4 was released in late 1997. This was the version that Microsoft bundled with Windows 98, a practice that increased IE’s market share from around 20% in late 1997 to a staggering 60% by 1999. But also, introduced the first of what would be countless anti-trust lawsuits both in the US an Europe against Microsoft.
Nick Eaton, author of The Microsoft Blog part of the Seattle PI has an in-depth post about Internet Explorer highlighting it’s rise (and fall) over the past 15-years. But the article is not just about IE, it also goes into the ‘browser wars’ with eventual death of Netscape, the introduction of Firefox and more recently the introduction of Google Chrome into the Browser Market.
Recently a forum member over at Go Firefox! was getting the below error whenever they tried to install a GreaseMonkey Script. They recently reinstalled Firefox with a fresh profile. They could install GreaseMonkey without issue but any time they tried to load up a script they got this ugly error:
Now, I know I had seen that error before but still took some searching to find the solution. Turns out this is caused by either a missing or damaged GreaseMonkey folder inside the profile folder. The fix is fairly simple and should only take a couple minutes:
Note: If you have not previously installed any GreaseMonkey scripts and the gm_scripts folder is present with files and folders inside of it, delete the contents inside the gm_scripts folder and then recreate the config.xml file as described in step 3.
Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 4.0 on August 11, 2010. This release is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended as a preview release for web application developers and the testing community.
Firefox 4 Beta 3 includes several major features and improvements – by testing them early we’ll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions of Firefox. The included Feedback Add-On that helps you let us know what you think about the new features and technologies in the beta.
You can read more about this release on the Mozilla Blog, or at any of the following links:
- Read more about some of the major features in this beta
- Take a look at our big chart o’ technology that’s included in this beta
- Read the release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 3
Source: Mozilla Developers News
One of the new features coming to Firefox 4 is going to be ‘silent’ updates. That is updates that are automatically downloaded and applied while the browser is running. Google Chrome (which Mozilla seems to be the bases for quite a bit of the new features of Firefox 4) has this as a standard behavior. Because of this though, 97% of Chrome installations are up-to-date, compared to Firefox’s 85% and Safari’s 53%.
Now before the hate comments start pouring in, let me point out a couple things:
Personally, I like this feature and will likely keep in enabled when I finally move to Firefox 4. Sometimes it takes a couple days for me to update my Firefox as I am working on something when the pop-up appears for the update. I’ll go ahead and download the update but then minimize the pop-up. Since I don’t normally shut-down my system each night, I’ll forget about the update until I happen to see the ‘Software Update’ Window sitting in my taskbar. But even then I may be in the middle of something and don’t really want to take the time to restart the browser and wait for the update to be applied. Also, with the recent scare with the Fake Firefox Update Page silent/automatic updates would a good thing.
Firefox 4 is being built off the new Gecko 2.0 rendering engine and is scheduled for release later this year with a Beta 3 release scheduled for around August 11, 2010.
Source: Download Squad
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