Spontaneous Monotony

The next major version of Firefox has hit release candidate status. That essentially means that the developers think it’s finished - a release candidate will be identical to the final release version UNLESS major bugs (that they missed in alpha and beta testing) appear when people test it.

If you’re already using the beta, you can get RC1 from the updater (Help –> Check for Updates) - the main difference you’ll notice is a slight change to the theme/colour scheme (more Vista-like on my Vista machine, and the URLs in the address bar history are now a nice blue colour). If you haven’t tried Firefox 3, and don’t want to wait for the final release which might be a few weeks away (you’re missing out on all the New Hawtness, and all you lose is access to online banking which uses browser-sniffer scripts. Hey that’s what IE7 or useragent spoofing is for :P) then you can get it in all the supported languages from Mozilla’s download page.

I posted the other day about the surprisingly poor quality of the new version of Safari. People elsewhere assumed that the widespread reports of problems were simply minor bugs, or people who didn’t know how to install it properly, and other such defences usually reserved for the few Microsoft fanboys out there.

Now it’s official. Wired has done a benchmark of various tasks (such things as loading the Gmail inbox page) and Safari came dead last. Yep, worse than IE. Not only that, their review uncovered the sort of crashes and stalls that Apple-zealots have been trying to pretend don’t exist. It’s just lucky for Apple that they weren’t planning to make any money out of Safari for Windows - it’s turning out to be their worst product release since the puck mouse.

EDIT: It’s full of security flaws too! The reputation of Apple’s software division is going up in smoke by the hour.

You might remember that a while back I mentioned a new Windows browser based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. That didn’t amount to much, but not wanting to be outdone, Apple have released Safari itself for Windows, and it is even worse!.

Most of the Apple software which is available for Windows is actually pretty good. It might lock out features that every other competitor provides for free (Quicktime), or refuse to work with any player other than Apple’s own (iTunes), but what it does do, it generally does well and with a nice user interface.

Safari blows this reputation out of the water. Its page loading is, according to Apple’s publicity pages, the dog’s dangles:

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Whoever wrote that should be careful he doesn’t put his nose near anyone’s eye. Safari is the most pig-slow piece of garbage that I have ever encountered. I’m not talking about complicated sites using lots of Flash or Javascript (I haven’t bothered to install the former, since I won’t be using Safari in its current state), I’m talking about relatively straightforward text-plus-pictures sites like BBC News. That, of course, assumes that it bothers to load the page at all. Often, during the ~5 second page loading time (by which point in any other browser I’ve reached the page and probably clicked a link to another one) the ‘progress bar’ will simply stop for no apparent reason. Sites that are working fine (as attested by IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera whatevernumber) simply fail to load. At all.

This could be down to individual connection foibles - I’m running NOD32’s Imon, and a router with its own firewall in addition to my software firewall. That wouldn’t be a particularly promising start (given that other browsers work in this setup) but it would at least be sort-of excusable for a Beta release. Unfortunately, from the comments at ‘Two a Day’, it seems that I am not alone:

Mac user at home, WinXP at work. Installed the beta at work and crashed when I tried to access Yahoo mail. Seems awfully counter productive to release a beta this unstable to the Windows people.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think that IE6 has finally lost its long-treasured crown of ‘worst Windows web browser ever’. Who would have thought that Apple, king of user-friendliness, could release such utter crap?

I’m writing this from the Alpha 4 version of ‘Gran Paradiso’, the traditionally pretentious codename for the next version of Firefox. Now, before downloading you are presented with the usual warnings, a whole pile of legalese which amounts to ‘if you use this software then you will definitely be eaten by rabid squirrels’. They even went to the trouble of posting download links to files that don’t exist, so that you have to hunt through the FTP server to download the thing.

I have to say though, on initial inspection I’m very impressed. It is lightning quick compared to Firefox 2. I haven’t noticed this much of a speed difference between browsers since I switched from IE6 to Firebird 0.4 way back when. That may of course be because all but one of my extensions (Adblock Plus is the black sheep) only work with version 2.x of Firefox - maybe I won’t bother reinstalling as many when Firefox 3 gets its final release (or when these evil weevil bugs catch up with me and I go back to Firefox 2?). Anyway, if this is the future of Firefox, roll on the future!

EDIT: Well that didn’t take long. All working fine until the CSS styling on PvXWiki didn’t work, and then two sites (one of which was Guild Wars Guru Auction) just wouldn’t load at all. Still, once they get minor bugs like refusing to load webpages sorted out, those speed increases will be brilliant