Sunday, March 20, 2011

TenFourfox 4.0 final released!

Since we don't get the official Firefox 4, I figured, why wait for the official release date? So go get it. This release fixes a subtle but nasty crash glitch in the JavaScript accelerator, fixes some more Command-shortcuts once and for all, and should also resolve trouble with window stacking. I've been using it myself on my G5 and iBook G4 for the last week and it's great. You'll love it too.

I should add one note about the build: before I left for my mini-vacation, Mozilla had been planning to make RC1 into 4.0 final, and I left the G5 buildhost to chug out the various architectures while I gallivanted around the coast. Mozilla then made a quick late-breaking announcement and popped out an RC2 with these fixes for bug 642395. Don't bother trying to look at the bug as it's sec-locked and I'm not part of the Mozilla security group either; just look at the diffs. It appears these changes are to temporarily blacklist certain certificates issued by Usertrust and I don't know why yet despite some cursory snooping around. The nature of the fix suggests this is temporary and of limited import, so rather than invalidating a whole lot of build work which has already been certified, I have elected to push out TenFourFox final relative to RC1 (those marked changes are the only difference between RC2 and RC1) unless I discover that the issue in question is more severe. If these patches are still in the tree by the time the next maintenance security/stability release comes due, then they will become part of TenFourFox also.

Which brings us to our next point: will there be point releases for Firefox 4? Signs point to yes. This is very good news, because I am hoping that Cairo 1.10 lands on mozilla-2.0 and helps our software rendering performance (see issue 7). If nothing else, it keeps us stabilized until we must do battle with Firefox 5. That will be the subject of a post to be made in the very near future.

For builders who want to build on this new stable (ho ho ho) basis, there are now new build instructions and the changesets for 4.0 final are relative to mozilla-2.0, not mozilla-central (although necessarily they would probably still largely apply there too). You probably want to clone mozilla-2.0 separately if you want to make your own builds off that stable branch and use those changesets. New changesets for "Firefox 5" are a totally separate topic, but assuming that we make the jump to Fx5 (again, a subject for a post coming soon), I will not be popping out separate beta changesets until Fx5 has itself entered beta -- i.e., no alpha changesets, sorry, unless there is significant demand.

In security news, Adobe Flash is once again being actively attacked. Adobe's advisory implies, but does not state clearly, that a fix will be issued for 10.1 (or PowerPC). This fix is supposed to come out sometime this week. If Adobe does not fix this for PPC, then watch out. Remember, plugins are deprecated in 4.0, and will be pref'ed off in the next major release. Get your Flashblock on now; it works fine with TenFourFox.

Anyway, go grab TenFourFox 4.0 final and make sure to flaunt it in the faces of your weenie Intel Mac-using friends. They'll be oh so jealous. ;)

10 comments:

  1. I think this is a TenFourFox issue...

    I play a browser game called Lord of Ultima. It has worked fine with previous versions of TenFourFox, but the 4.0 final release (March 20) breaks the game. I don't know if this will help you, but TenFourFox 4.0 final crashes when I attempt to navigate certain game windows by clicking on tabs within the windows. If I go back to beta 13, everything works fine.

    I think I have narrowed it down to this setting:

    javascript.options.tracejit.content

    If I set it true, TenFourFox crashes. If I set it false, everything seems to work fine. In previous versions of TenFourFox, I don't think this setting affected the game. Both settings do work with beta 13.

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  2. Awesome application! Keep up the work!

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  3. Tony, go ahead and report it, but I'll need some STRs I can reproduce the bug with for testing. Please put those into the bug report. If the game is not free or requires other kinds of payment, however, I will not be able to debug it.

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  4. Julien, I think I know what's wrong based on Tony's STR and a few other data points I acquired. If this strikes you a lot, you can toggle off the accelerator using the pref that Tony identified. I am waiting to see if this generates a lot of bug traffic and if it does, I will force a mid-stream release. However, I'm going to wait and see what Mozilla does first since this will put our version numbers out of sync.

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  5. After some further examination, I've decided to reissue 4.0 under the same version number. The 7450 build is up, which I believe is the one you guys are using, the G5 version is building now, and I will work overnight to get 7400 and G3 ones up also. This should correct these problems. Separate blog note to follow.

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  6. d/l'd the current 7450 zip file, expanded I get a bunch of folders...eh, how does this 10-4 work? No install instructions I could find, readme doesn't say?

    thx

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  7. Use the BOMArchiveHelper to unpack it. It sounds like you used a regular unzip utility that didn't properly restore the package bit. BOMArchiveHelper is in /System/Library/CoreServices. You should just end up with an .app.

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  8. Thx so much! For some reason my 10.5.8 doesn't have BOMArchiveHelper in that location. I do have it on my 10.3.9 partition. However you were correct about not unzipping correctly. I was getting a file that ended in .r instead of .r.app. Checked prefs for Zipeg, found under 'what to extract', the option "selection" was enabled instead of "Whole archive". Changed that, bingo it upzipped correctly-producing the desired app with associated file icon.

    Now if we could only get Torbutton to work :( (not that I can get it to work under 10.5.8, TorB for FF only works for me in 10.3.9 with truly ancient browsers that barely render properly these days).

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  9. BOMArchiveHelper is called Archive Utility.app in 10.5.

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  10. HI, I am running tenfourfox on an emac os 10.4.11.
    When I try to stream a video, two thngs happen-
    real player wants to download the video, and asks for an update but cannot find firefox on my machine ,
    2. the video streams in duplicate- layered either on the same page, or just behind. The stream is choppy, and not much fun to watch...any Ideas?
    tanks joshuangordon@gmail.com

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