Gee's Blog World: Firefox Friday -- "Beta 2 is coming, and it'll break stuff" edition

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Firefox Friday -- "Beta 2 is coming, and it'll break stuff" edition

Filed under: Features, Mozilla, Browsers

As Sebastian jaunts around Montenegro snapping photos, the task has fallen to me to cover this week's spate of Firefox news... So grab your stuffed Foxkeh and pull up a chair -- it's time for the Friday Five!

Firefox 4 Beta 2 is coming soon (as in today, maybe)!
... Which is great news! I've been using Firefox 4 for my primary browser since the first beta builds showed up on the Mozilla nightly servers. It's fast and as customizable as it ever was, and Sebastian even discovered that its hardware acceleration performance was right up there with Internet Explorer 9's.

Beta 2 was actually slated for release today, but the download page is still serving up b1. When it's ready, you'll find Firefox 4 beta 2 at getfirefox.com/beta/.

As with many good changes, however, all the improvements in Firefox 4 can't come with some kind of trade off... Right?

NSFW [language] musical interlude about breakage -- courtesy Limp Bizkit and YouTube user Dave Niemela

Related: FF4 beta 2 is going to break a ton of extensions.
Over at CyberNet, Ryan Wagner ran an interesting post earlier this week about an important change to the Firefox 4b2 internals. The change is part of the Gecko 2.0 engine, and it affects the way XPCOM components are registered by Firefox. While this change is a good thing -- it'll help with multithreading and (hopefully) no-restart extension installs -- it's going to cripple a lot of extensions.

While no one wants to hear that his or her favorite extensions may not work, Wagner also posted some encouraging news. The changes required to his CyberSearch add-on only took 30 minutes to code -- so any extensions you use which are actively maintained will probably be fixed up in short order.

Wagner feels the change is undeniably good, however, saying "...it's better in the long run. Previously if you did anything with an extension (install, remove, enable, disable, etc...) you would have to restart your browser, and doing so would require ALL of your browser components to have to re-register. With the way it was set up every component would be loaded and executed, then unloaded, then reloaded again during the restart."

As for my (our?) hopes for no-restart installs? Not so fast, he says: "You'll still need to restart your browser after installing/updating extensions, but now the components are pulled directly out of the extension's manifest file which avoids many of the otherwise poor side effects." As of beta 2, then, it's safe to assume it's not going to happen.

Firefox Home for the iPhone keeps getting better!
One of our readers, Chad Tunis, noticed that Firefox Home [App Store link] had a rather serious hang-up. It seems all of his neatly-organized bookmarks which were hidden behind labels simply stayed hidden. Firefox Home displayed the labels, but wouldn't allow him to tap through to the actual bookmarks.

He wrote in asking if we'd heard of a solution, but we hadn't. Fortunately, however, I got a reply from Chad yesterday saying that Mozilla had fixed the bug and that his labels were all working 100%!

That's great news for any of you who run Firefox on your desktop and use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch for your mobile browsing. Mozilla is clearly intent on delivering the best experience they can on those devices (within Apple's restrictions, of course).

Also worth noting: Firefox Home is still one of the top 100 free apps in the App Store.... Woo! It's currently at #98, just a few behind *sigh* Free Sex Positions Decision Maker.

TabCandy is damn cool, and it'll change the way you manage tabs in Firefox 4!
If you're already playing with Firefox 4, you probably aren't opposed to checking out experimental add-ons. That being the case, you really should check out TabCandy, an awesome little project Aza Raskin has been working away at. I recently shared a brief video of TabCandy in action -- but you really should give it a try yourself!

That's all for this week! Next week we'll be back with more Mozilla/FF news!