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Firefox isn't going anywhere, market share might go up and down but we're not at the point where we need just 1 or 2 browsers.

Edit: And having just IE and Chrome would slow down progress again since it'd stall specs.

For the foreseeable future, there will be five browser: IE, Chrome, FF, Opera, and Safari. Should keep the competition and innovation healthy, and really can't think of any other major players that would want to invest in building a new browser. Only Facebook has a potential reason and the money to do so, but would be a waste of resources for them.

IE (excluding IE9) and Chrome are basically swapping marketshare, while the other three are have been pretty stead over the past year. Should get interesting from this month forward after IE9 and FF4 releases to see how users decide which browser is best for them.

Awesome find , also one must consider that Firefox 4 compared to Firefox 3.6 is AGGEESSS AHEEADD and the time taken seems less to me sometimes , its just that they failed to deliver products at the time they promised (or rather targeted in wiki notes and we took it as promise) , that's what made us feel they are slow , if they had said Firefox 4 would come next year Q1 , no one would have said development is slow

I feel Mozilla development process is slow because when they release new features in FF, they are usually old, and other browsers already had them for a while (like decent UI on Windows, addon manager as a tab, bookmarks sync, etc.). The only thing Mozilla can do quickly? Mockups. Unfortunately, making those pictures real takes them forever ...

Install latest beta from here: https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblockplus/

I managed to get the 1.3.3 installed without any issue yesterday, but I didn't realize that there are newer builds released over the past few weeks.

Did Mozilla change the font or font effects with FF4? I've installed a few previous betas, now I'm using FF4b12. There is something different about the font style or effect. It either reminds me of looking at text in Safari or looking at text on an old flat screen crt trinitron monitor. Its hard for me to explain but, something is different about it. Any input?

Can't bring myself to use Firefox 4 simply because of the enormous start-up time. I sometimes wonder if it'll load at all and then pop it appears. Using beta 12.

In comparison, Chrome 10 is up in under a second from cold boot.

I have a 3GHz Core2Duo laptop with 4GB of RAM and Firefox 4 is taking 7 seconds to be usable from a warm (but not recent) boot and much longer for a cold boot. A warm and recent boot is pretty much instant, like all apps in Windows 7 though.

Firefox 4 uses DirectWrite instead of GDI, so text looks different (but the same as other DirectWrite apps like the XPS viewer or IE9)

Edit: If you don't like it, you can disable DirectWrite and Direct2D in about:config (search for "direct2d")

I did that and two listings came up the first one was "gfx.direct2d.disabled". I "toggled" or double clicked it and it bolded that line. I re-started FF and now its not nearly as bad on my eyes. The second listing was this "gfx.direct2d.force-enabled" I didn't touch that one. What is it though?

like the ability to manually add search engines, which is something I find essential for fast/convenient browsing.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_Bar

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/search%20bar

http://lifehacker.com/#!196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art-of-keyword-bookmarking

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

What more adding of search engines do you need?

Please consider what you say just a little bit more... Check your facts before you become an internet liar.

How funny does that last part sound hehe

Can't bring myself to use Firefox 4 simply because of the enormous start-up time. I sometimes wonder if it'll load at all and then pop it appears. Using beta 12.

In comparison, Chrome 10 is up in under a second from cold boot.

I have a 3GHz Core2Duo laptop with 4GB of RAM and Firefox 4 is taking 7 seconds to be usable from a warm (but not recent) boot and much longer for a cold boot. A warm and recent boot is pretty much instant, like all apps in Windows 7 though.

It takes me around that much time on warm boot as well but I don't find it annoying. Chrome (in my case) takes as much time as well when filled with webapps though. But I agree, they need to find a way to trim down the warm boot time but I don't think it should be a priority.

I did that and two listings came up the first one was "gfx.direct2d.disabled". I "toggled" or double clicked it and it bolded that line. I re-started FF and now its not nearly as bad on my eyes. The second listing was this "gfx.direct2d.force-enabled" I didn't touch that one. What is it though?

DirectWrite, or the options?

DirectWrite is a new hardware accelerated text rendering API designed to replace GDI. GDI at it's core is designed for CRT screens, and is incapable of taking advantage of LCD screens (And can't be made to do so without breaking programs). One side effect is that since the glyphs are no longer forced to take up a whole pixel, some people say it's "blurry" (Which is one of the complaints thrown at Quartz on OS X, which doesn't have the GDI limitations)

DirectWrite is linked to Direct2D, you can mix them but it's so buggy and slow that you don't want to do that (DirectWrite and no Direct2D results in black pixels everywhere, Direct2D with no DirectWrite slows down the browser terribly)

As for the options, "gfx.direct2d.disabled" is self explanatory, and "gfx.direct2d.force-enabled" is there for forcing Direct2D to be enabled when it would otherwise be disabled (due to old drivers, blocked hardware, etc.)

DirectWrite, or the options?

DirectWrite is a new hardware accelerated text rendering API designed to replace GDI. GDI at it's core is designed for CRT screens, and is incapable of taking advantage of LCD screens (And can't be made to do so without breaking programs). One side effect is that since the glyphs are no longer forced to take up a whole pixel, some people say it's "blurry" (Which is one of the complaints thrown at Quartz on OS X, which doesn't have the GDI limitations)

DirectWrite is linked to Direct2D, you can mix them but it's so buggy and slow that you don't want to do that (DirectWrite and no Direct2D results in black pixels everywhere, Direct2D with no DirectWrite slows down the browser terribly)

As for the options, "gfx.direct2d.disabled" is self explanatory, and "gfx.direct2d.force-enabled" is there for forcing Direct2D to be enabled when it would otherwise be disabled (due to old drivers, blocked hardware, etc.)

Thanks for your help. I have a LCD and with that change in FF4. It was hard to read. I could read it but, it strained my eyes and was uncomfortable to look at. Toggling the first option changed it back. Thank you. Its a lot easier on my eyes now. Its funny because, I have IE9 installed as well and I didn't notice they were using it too until you said so. I notice it now but, it wasn't nearly as bad as it was on FF4.

Does anyone know how to keep Firefox 4 bookmark button keeps open-window or drop list after middle-clicking to open a bookmark site in the background? It's so annoyance to reclick the bookmark button if you want to open may background tab in your bookmark.

I use Stay open menu:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stay-open-menu/

Firefox 4 uses DirectWrite instead of GDI, so text looks different (but the same as other DirectWrite apps like the XPS viewer or IE9)

Edit: If you don't like it, you can disable DirectWrite and Direct2D in about:config (search for "direct2d")

I wonder if turning of 'Use Hardware Acceleration When Available' in the Options > Advanced tab does the same thing .. or not?

I'm sure I read something about this a couple of weeks ago .. can't remember where now ..

Anybody know for sure?

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    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
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