Firefox 4 Nears the 100M Download Mark

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
One month ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 4 and will top the one millionth download sometime later today. Not too shabby for a browser that has been described as slow in comparison to other major players.

Like Erick, I too had stopped using Firefox because it was so excruciatingly slow, and was pleasantly surprised at how much faster 4 was compared to 3.6 and even compared to Chrome when loading Flash heavy sites.
Click to expand...
 
I uninstalled firefox 4, it still seems to be a beta. It's way too buggy. IE9 and Chrome for me.
 
Absolutely phenomenal browser. Full HWA, great javascript engine and all the add-ons I use are still compatible.

I love it so much I decided to upgrade to Aurora 5.02. It's even fucking faster.
 
I'm curious who all these users are that are claiming firefox as slow? I don't recall firefox ever getting "slow" on my box.

Or are these people who are just anal about their browser using more than 30mb of ram even though they probably have multiple gigs of free ram on their computer?
 
I've used Firefox multiple times, and always end up abandoning it for a superior browser like Opera or Chrome. Just recently I had Firefox 4 with about a dozen tabs open, and it was taking up 3.6 gigs of RAM when I checked my process manager. Open source ftw I guess? :rolleyes:
 
fishrule said:
I've used Firefox multiple times, and always end up abandoning it for a superior browser like Opera or Chrome. Just recently I had Firefox 4 with about a dozen tabs open, and it was taking up 3.6 gigs of RAM when I checked my process manager. Open source ftw I guess? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Seriously, just imagine if your whole operating system was open source... **shudders**
 
Firefox is the best browser, at least for me. Tried Explorer and Chrome... but always go back FF.

Nice to hear that FF is getting its 100Mth download soon. :)
 
fishrule said:
I've used Firefox multiple times, and always end up abandoning it for a superior browser like Opera or Chrome. Just recently I had Firefox 4 with about a dozen tabs open, and it was taking up 3.6 gigs of RAM when I checked my process manager. Open source ftw I guess? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
More likely poorly developed add-ons. I was surprised to see how little RAM Firefox 4.0 actually used when I was forced to reinstalled Windows 7, SP1 and Firefox from scratch, so I removed all the fancy cosmetic and reload add-ons.

I'd really like to see a browser usage graph per browser version AND OS version, not just per browser version.
 
fishrule said:
I've used Firefox multiple times, and always end up abandoning it for a superior browser like Opera or Chrome. Just recently I had Firefox 4 with about a dozen tabs open, and it was taking up 3.6 gigs of RAM when I checked my process manager. Open source ftw I guess? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

What has open source got to do with anything? I'd rather you mentioned some specifics in your issue, but like Chimel said it seems to indicate some addon causing a memory leak. For eg. even a widely used addon like Better Gmail was giving me issues while sending mails in Gmail.

I'm a web dev and I use FF4 on a daily basis in work as well as play on a 3 year old Celly based notebook with 2GB RAM and am yet to find a reason to drop it. Granted that Chrome is the faster browser as far JS based gui's go, but FF4 is still pretty decent.
 
Joe Average said:
Chrome isn't open source, Chromium is which forms the basis of Chrome. Big difference?

Not convinced? From Google itself:



So again, Chrome is not open source, but Chromium is.
Click to expand...

And the difference between the two is in name only. Chrome still uses all of the same code as Chromium - which is open source.

It's a battle of semantics, nothing more.
 
Chrome adds a lot of functionality that doesn't exist in Chromium, the basis. Google adds that stuff to Chrome - it's the primary reason that version of the codebase is not open source.

Most notably? Chromium cannot open/read PDF files as it has no PDF licensed code in the source - that's a feature of Chrome that Google added. I had suspected it for a long time so I checked just in case using the most current build of Chromium available (12.0.746.0 (82796)) as of ~30 minutes ago and, nope, ain't happening.

So no, they are not the same browser, as I already pointed out. It ain't semantics - they really are different.
 
Fun to see how peoples personal preferences jade them. IE 9 = OK but not anything to write home about. Usable product.
Chrome = Nice, I use it regularly. For me it does not seem to be ZOMG Blazing Uber fast!!! But it certainly is not slow either.
Opera 11.10 = Actually the first Opera that ive that I actually kinda enjoyed using.
Firefox 4 = not the ZOMG Speed Demon that does not exist in any of the major browsers, but it ended up as my daily browser again on pure "Surfing Merrit". Not because it Blew the rest out of the water, but because over all it gives me a slightly more satisfying web experience. For me, even with a LOT of tabs open I do not see anywhere near 3.6 gigs usage on ram...

have a good one
 
El Barto said:
I uninstalled firefox 4, it still seems to be a beta. It's way too buggy. IE9 and Chrome for me.
Click to expand...

same for me, i think the issue is people are on the bandwagon hate IE and just wont even try it cause they think it is still like IE6 or just cant think for themselves and want to hate on MS, and they havent tried Chrome or just don't like change, or possibly lack of custom plugins they are stuck on.
 
MrGuvernment said:
same for me, i think the issue is people are on the
#1 bandwagon hate IE and just wont even try it cause they think it is still like IE6
#2or just cant think for themselves and want to hate on MS
#3and they havent tried Chrome
#4or just don't like change
#5or possibly lack of custom plugins they are stuck on.
Click to expand...

Multiple issues I'd say.
 
Chrome > * :p

I've been trying to find some reason to like FF over other browsers and I just can't. 4.0 still has stability issues and it lacks any must have features.
 
pxc said:
4.0 still has stability issues for me and it lacks any must have features that I can come up with.
Click to expand...

FTFY (ok, a little flair added for good measure) :D

I've had one single "crash" of Firefox 4 since I've been using it which is quite some time now, and I was a serious 3.6.x user, almost to the point where I was dead certain I wouldn't be switching to Firefox 4 anytime in the near future - and that was months ago.

But I sat down one day and said "Ok, I can do this, I already know I can't stand the default layout, and I know Firefox is more customizable than any other browser out there, period, so... let's figure this shit out" and I proceeded to spend the next two days browsing threads over at Neowin's forums for customizing Firefox 4 based on userChrome.css file edits and modifications. After those two days, I had Firefox 4 configured precisely the way I imagined it could be, exactly the way I had pictured it in my imagination (from a visual perspective), and then I also got everything working as far as scripting, addons, extensions, plugins, etc.

One crash, and it's been running on this laptop effectively for 2+ months now.

So, what defines "stable" 'cause I see people toss that word around constantly, for a variety of reasons (hardware, software, OSes, apps, etc) and I honestly think sometimes that people simply don't know what it actually entails. Reminds me of the classic line from "The Princess Bride" (and note, I'm not directing the image's content at any ONE specific person):

youkeepusingthatword.jpg


It's entirely possible that a given app with a given codebase can run perfect on my machine with the same OS but would crash consistently on someone else's hardware that's completely different, with different apps, perhaps even a slightly different version of the same OS (Windows 7 Home Premium vs Pro, even though they should be the same for all intents and purposes), and so on.

So, whenever I see or hear people comment on something like stability, I have to wonder: what the hell is going on with their machines - or even mine for that matter - that I would be able to run a given app without issues, or very minimal problems (like one single crash in 60+ days of constant usage) whereas someone else has nothing but problems.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? :p
 
Here we are a month later, and it's still being download 8-900 times a minute. :eek:
 
I'm sticking with 3.6 for now until all of my extensions are ported over... my theme has always been a pain to upgrade as well
 
I wonder how many of those downloads are from the same people over and over again. It has been said that people will do it to push the number higher, lol.

Either way I go between FF and Chrome depending on what I feel like using at that moment.
 
I highly doubt people have that much time to waste, but if they do it for Firefox, others must do it for IE too, so the market share between browsers stays true.
 
Chimel said:
I highly doubt people have that much time to waste, but if they do it for Firefox, others must do it for IE too, so the market share between browsers stays true.
Click to expand...
Maybe or maybe not, but can you show me even 1 instance of someone mentioning downloading IE more to boost the count? Bet I can for FF right on this very site ;).
 
Seems way buggy to me. I can't find a check updates button anywhere and I hate auto update anything. Also seems to lock up a lot.
 
slickmitch said:
Seems way buggy to me. I can't find a check updates button anywhere and I hate auto update anything. Also seems to lock up a lot.
Click to expand...

Help -> About Firefox.

You can also shut-off auto-update under the Options window, like you always could. And the big update button in the new Tab bar is pretty obvious.
 
conholster said:
same for me, i think the issue is people are on the
#1 bandwagon hate IE and just wont even try it cause they think it is still like IE6
#2or just cant think for themselves and want to hate on MS
#3and they havent tried Chrome
#4or just don't like change
#5or possibly lack of custom plugins they are stuck on.
Click to expand...



#1 I've seen more bandwagon hate on FF than the other browsers. IE9 is merely "ok". It feels much slower than Chrome and FF when browsing.
#2 :rolleyes:
#3 Or they have and find that it feels the most beta of all of the browsers.
#4 Or "change" is a step backwards :rolleyes:
#5 Probably the only legitimate reason listed.
 
Firefox 4 is great. my only gripe is the text-rendering engine. All I had to do to fix it was install antialiasing tuner and it worked great.
 
i was one of those downloaders. if only ie could enlarge text without taking images out of their native sizes it would be ftw.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top