CNet News
Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals.
“Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us,” said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a Webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. “We created the performance story, and we’ve got to keep at it.”
Among other features planned for Firefox 4–and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change–are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support for several newer Web technologies; 64-bit versions; and compatibility with multitouch interfaces.
Obviously this has to do with the fact that IE is twice as fast as firefox is (and I wasn’t even using any extensions, hardly)
I have no issues with the speed of firefox once its loaded, but GOD it takes an age to load. I have only 3 extensions but even before those were added it was still as slow as molasses to load.
First, I like my tabs on the BOTTOM of the browser. The only way to do that (other than getting Opera) is with Tab Mix Plus for Firefox, which is likely to be broken by the new tabs layout.
Second, the competition for a 3D standard in a web browser is over, and WebGL has beaten X3D (VRML) and O3D (Google) as the clear winner. Time to start adding native support in browsers.
Gee, I was happy with the speed of Firefox.
“La, la, la, la, la – – – – ”
A nice red fox is much better than a Blue E. You guys need to get your priorities right.
AdBlock, Flashblock.
Firefox FTW
I WANT FIREFOX 4 and Ubuntu and Adobe Flash to work MUCH better and TAKE UP less SYSTEM resources!!
– Ubuntu 10.04, Firfox latest, and Windows 7 with IE, on dual boot
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I like IE its not a bad browsers, but I don’t use it because I am on Ubuntu most of the times. On windows 7, IE is the really good, infact I did not even download firefox on windows.
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– i have never used chrome, the only think i like about google is the search, and the mail…but i never customize my homepage using “igoogle” or something. I hate things like that. (aside, i also hate social networks…)
– i personally don’t care about speed, as long as it not like 10 seconds to load… 1 – 6 sec is good, so for me speed does not really matter.
Now when i am no windows 7, IE is really good because it does not crash and it loads fast. On Ubuntu firfox is really bad with flash stuff and uses like 70% of CUP sometimes (it is really bad) it also crashes.
I stopped using Firefox, it started taking up insane amounts of memory. Even after I removed all the extensions I would find it chewing up 850 megs of memory. Switched to Chrome and have been really happy with it.
Playing catchup with Opera.
I use FireFox at home with a very few add ins and it seems fast enough. I use IE at work and it seems fast enough.
Use what you like but this speed fixation does not impress me much when all the browsers I use seem to be fast enough the difference doesn’t matter
On the other hand the hand the quality of your connection makes a huge difference.
Do we STILL need to use that icon? Shouldn’t it now be Chrome being bitten by Firefox?
Ahem, Chrome or Safari.
Seriously, Firefox on Windows is painful. Either Chrome or Safari just works better. OK, Safari on Windows is goofy. Sorry, Apple. That’s right up there with Microsoft Bob.
Oh yeah, Opera is, well, you know, Opera. Kind of like having your cousin over for dinner. Nothing particularly wrong, and yes it loads fast, just feels out of place. Can’t put my finger on it.
Firefox has a universe of plugins and is the best browser out there for it’s robustness. It is my preferred home browser. Opera and the like appear to be light weight browsers for embedded devices and cellphones.
Once FF Release 4 comes out, it will close the already narrow performance gap it has with Chrome. They are both built with the Webkit development system.
At work (laptop), I use Chrome for personal use because of it’s speed and small footprint and IE for work related (required for intranet).
Until Chrome/Safari has NoScript, AdBlock, a flipping sidebar(!) and equivalents to all my extensions, it’s a non-starter for me. IMO, FF is faster than IE especially for development. When I enable IE7’s developer tools, IE drags to a crawl.
I use Opera and Firefox. Once, that covered all the compatibility issues, but now occasionally a page won’t work properly in either. Then Chrome works, but I shut it down immediately after because it is such a CPU hog.
The posters here have expressed a wide gamut of views, which shows how difficult browser design must be. My wish for Opera and Firefox is to re-think the whole Tabs-Bookmarks-History-Cache-WorkOffline-SavePages-Favicons-TooManyTabs galaxy. I know that I have too many tabs open but the various methods of management are clunky. For example, is it too much to ask to put a web page to sleep, and then when I want to see it, allow quick access and have it reload from disk cache? Or if a site doesn’t bother to have a favicon, to be able to define a favicon oneself for the tab bar (or whatever the equivalent of a tab bar will be in the new design)?
How can so many people contradict one another about so many things, things that shouldn’t be debatable and should be easy to check, like how much memory is being used, vis a vis browsers?
Could it be… that most of these opinions are coming from employees of the various browser companies?
I’m anticipating the new version. I only wish they curb it’s resource usage :/
For those that are having problems loading Firefox with plugins, it might be something else that’s causing it to slow down. I have roughly 10 plugins and I don’t notice any slowdowns during boot or page loads. Using latest released version.
I do, however, have some bugs that I can’t seem to fix easily.
10s to completely load DU.
1s to start Firefox, from cache likely. Meaning, after opening it once it takes 1s to load it again at any time.
10 plugins.
Opera would be perfect if it didn’t have so many compatibility issues. It’s the perfect browser for me as far as customization and speed…it just chokes on too many pages.
I’m getting sucked with new version of firefox. It seems a bug with new version.