Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0beta/releasenotes/

by Garbage • 15 years ago

78 65 15 years ago

mozilla.com

ujjvala• 15 years ago

Use it if you want break all the working addons for nothing.

freakwit• 15 years ago

The list of bugfixes is hardly nothing: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0beta/releasenotes/bu...

wisty2• 15 years ago

Still, there's no reason to break bugfixes. Heck, a lot of them still work, if you flag some "developer mode", but you don't need to do that in Chrome.

Who care's if Mozilla has more extensions? They cause too much trouble when you upgrade.

nothis• 15 years ago

This was with FF3, I think, but I once managed to over-write all my bookmarks with the temp ones from doing a separate install for a beta. Probably "my fault" on some level, but it still sucked. I have an aversion to trying out betas since then.

lurker194• 15 years ago

Not your fault, but that is a risk of using a Beta (before Google hijacked the term to mean "Upgrades are Planned").

Bugs like what you saw are flagged as high-importance "data loss" bugs, and FF has gotten better about avoiding those, even in pre-release builds, since the bad old days of accidentally deleting non-FF data from your home folder.

trezor• 15 years ago

None of my extensions are broken or disabled so far. I can totally see your scepticism and where you are coming from though. With the update from FF3.x to FF4 it was all hell with extensions and it has been like that between previous major versions as well.

Just thought I'd report that for my (somewhat meager) selection of addons, I haven't found anything auto-disabled or crashing yet.

nodata• 15 years ago

Why do we have version 5 already?

robin_reala• 15 years ago

Firefox is moving to a more Chrome-style of version numbering, to try and get enhancements out to the web quicker.

wisty2• 15 years ago

Or to try and get more free cake from the IE team ;)

afhof• 15 years ago

If I wanted Chrome features, I'd download Chrome. The reason I use FF is /because/ I don't want to use Chrome. If FF just copies from other browsers, why have FF at all?

TheloniusPhunk• 15 years ago

Yeah, I just downloaded 4 like a month ago.

joubert• 15 years ago

IndexedDB?

kia• 15 years ago

Actually the first beta of FF5 is available for almost a month on their ftp here

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/5.0b1/

asadotzler• 15 years ago

That wasn't really a real beta. that was simply a copy of then Aurora to the beta channel to test the process and the channel switching utility in Firefox.

eiji• 15 years ago

Hm, still no win64 build available.

I mean they don't have to promote it through their website, just put it on the ftp. Take advantage of the dev-channel for some testing. Yeah, I know, I don't need Flash ...

cemerick2• 15 years ago

The state of PDF support in Firefox on OS X has me stuck at FF 3.6, and it doesn't look like that'll be changing for a while (unless I want to experiment with random xpi's and running FF 4+ in 32-bit mode, etc).

Until that's resolved, all the fancy CSS tweaks in the world won't mean a hoot.

randallsquared2• 15 years ago

On OS X, there's possibly the best PDF viewer ever, in Preview. I'm curious why you'd want so strongly to avoid using it?

m_eiman2• 15 years ago

I prefer opening a PDF in a tab until I've had a chance to see if it's something I want to keep. With download-and-open-in-Preview I'm filling up my Downloaded Files folder with a lot of PDFs that I don't want to keep, and I'll have to delete them manually.

jaysonelliot• 15 years ago

Whatever engine Apple is using to view PDFs in Preview, it doesn't always display PDFs correctly.

It's much faster than the bloated beast that is Acrobat, but I'd say about 20% of the documents I open in Preview have to be viewed in Acrobat to be usable, so I've just defaulted to avoiding Preview instead.

A good, fast PDF viewer in the browser would be far better than either of those options.

ggchappell• 15 years ago

Could you explain the problem you're referring to (or point me to a page that does)?

I'm currently running FF 3.6 on OS X. Getting regular announcements of 4.0, and thinking I'll install it sometime soon. I don't usually pay much attention to what features/problems the new version might have. So, what's up with this?

dooq• 15 years ago

I tried upgrading to FF4 on OSX, and it was a disaster: crashing on me left, right, and center. I went back to FF3.6 in under a week of use. I suggest OSX users wait for some stability updates before upgrading.

code_duck2• 15 years ago

If PDFs are that important to you, why not just use the external PDF viewer of your choice?

naner3• 15 years ago

FF or Chromium (or both) should embed MuPDF[1]. It is extremely fast, reasonably small, and renders very well.

1: http://mupdf.com/

abraham3• 15 years ago

It looks like Chromium doesn't have it but Google Chrome has a built in PDF viewer.

ephemient• 15 years ago

Chrome bundles a PDF renderer. (You won't find it in the open Chromium sources; it's by proprietary license from a third party.)

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/bringing-improved-pdf-suppo...

It's already sandboxed and pretty fast and light-weight, so I'm not sure the Chromium developers would put much work into a replacement.

sapper2• 15 years ago

Unless they have the quick, silent updates of Chrome AND the (so far) perfect quality control of Chrome, these quick releases do more harm then good.

dpcan• 15 years ago

I JUST downloaded FF4 and now I see 5 is coming out.

Version-less updates of browsers makes sense, and they should be seamlessly, silently, updated in the back-ground. This is getting crazy.

I install Firefox for friends and family who I want off IE, and this actually embarrasses me a little. If I have to keep telling them to update, they will quit - or end up using REALLY OLD versions of Firefox and we'll have an IE6 situation all over again soon but with Firefox.

I'm starting to install Chrome now. At least I can say that their browser will always update, and they have nothing to worry about.

jcitme• 15 years ago

if Firefox 17 came out 3 months ago and we are currently on Firefox 20, I don't think that's any less secure than running 3.6.5 when 3.6.7 came out...

code_duck2• 15 years ago

Firefox has always done a good job of handling updates. It is not in the background, but it is painless and automatic once you agree to upgrade. It will never be anything like IE6 - how many people do you see using Firefox 2? or even 3.0?

The upgrade to 5 isn't much different than going from 3.8 to 3.16. Mainly, they've changed their numbering scheme, so there's no reason to make a big deal about it.

thomas112• 15 years ago

Firefox 5 is not coming out. It's a beta. You shouldn't bother friends and family with it.

redemade• 15 years ago

seriously... WHY aren't other browser vendors adopting the chrome release strategy?

horser4dish2• 15 years ago

There's still a market for people who want to manually upgrade. There was a comment thread on HN a few months ago about this as well (no way we'll be able to find it now, I don't remember the story), but it summarized my views very well. I like knowing what is or isn't being installed on my computer. I've got a bash script to automatically download and update to the newest Firefox, so the act of upgrading isn't a chore. But I don't want a given company, be it Google or Mozilla, to arbitrarily change what's on my computer.

That's not to say I don't see the allure of automatic updates, but I just don't want them to be silent and mandatory.

cfinke• 15 years ago

When a new version of Firefox comes out, I always like to find the oldest bug that it fixes. It looks like the winner this time is a 12-year-old bug affecting MathML: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21479

Also fixed is this 7-year-old bug that has annoyed me for years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254714 (When you open a link in a new tab, the new page's URL doesn't appear in the Location Bar until the page loads.)

nickknw• 15 years ago

Wow, thanks for pointing out that second one. That's bugged me for some time too!

Firefox 5 Beta is available for download

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