Submitted by After a very long development phase, Mozilla has finally officially relased Firefox 4.0. The binaries were already up on the FTP sites yesterday, but today the release became official. Firefox 4.0 packs a heck of a lot of new features, including an entirely new user interface.
The speed department is probably where Firefox made the most important strides. Startup time – one of my personal pet peeves about Firefox vs. Chrome – has been improved greatly. For those of us who don’t care about startup times, the more itneresting speed improvements come in the rendering of web pages, of course. Improvements in the JavaScript engine, as well as the introduction of hardware acceleration, makes sure of that.
The interface has been entirely redone and looks nothing like Firefox 3.x. It’s not just skin-deep; new features have been added such as Panorama for easier tab management, searching for open tabs within the URL bar, and App Tabs, which allows you to pin websites as permanent tabs in your browsers (much like Chrome’s ‘pin’ feature).
There’s a lot more in Firefox 4, so I suggest you update your installation, or download the new version from Mozilla.
speedy. font sucks tho – had to disable directwrite :/
Yeah, same here. CLEARTYPE PLSKTNHXBI.
Fonts work fine on real OS’s.
You are right about that one. I installed Firefox 4 on Snow Leopard, Slackware, and Windows 7, Using Firefox 4 on Windows 7 made me dizzy and made my eyes hurt. Worst font rendering ever…..
Edited 2011-03-23 03:32 UTC
Which graphics card and driver version? Seems to make a difference when it comes to DirectWrite. I find the text looks different than FF3.6, but is easily readable – that’s with a GF460 and 266.58 drivers.
YMMV, but the times I’ve been on OSX I always found fonts to be fuzzy nasty-looking, whereas Windows and various Linux distros have been fine.
Edited 2011-03-23 13:39 UTC
Notice that if you really care, you can go to about:config and disable directwrite.
Actually, there is a known Windows bug about that, and Microsoft recently released a fix. In principle, Windows Update should get it for you.
Unless, of course, you inherently prefer ClearType-style crisp-but-distorted massively-hinted font rendering. In which case you probably hate Mac OS X’s font rendering altogether.
Got a link to info on that? I though problems with DirectWrite were primarily a graphics vendor driver bug
I would like to thanks Mozilla Corp/Foundation for this. Even if Firefox is losing market share to Chrome, it’s still the best browser (for me) around.
It will be interesting to see if the release have any impact on the market share trend life FF3 did, surely, we wont see 500 million download today, but how will it compare to IE9 in term of adoption? It will be interesting to see.
Firefox+Firefox mobile is the best combo too, they integrate very well with each other and the mobile UI is great.
What phone you using for Firefox mobile?
I was about to install it last night on my phone but all the reviews on the Android market place said it was slow, unusable, and didn’t support Flash.
Early betas of Firefox Mobile sure were slow. But the current Release Canditate is snappy!
It was benchmarked by some as faster than what was already installed on the phone. Some others had other results. But is encouraging.
Last few year Firefox lost 1% of marketshare, I think their userbase still grew because the market as a whole is still growing.
IE lost 10% ? Eventhough it is the default browser on 95% of all PC’s ?
And thus Firefox became the biggest browser in Europe.
I think when Chrome started advertising or atleast gathering some real interest is about ‘may 2009’ ?
Let’s say IE had 62% marketshare, in the years when Mozilla started it was 95% (!). I think that was the hardest part.
Here some numbers:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201102
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_explorer#Market_adoption_and_…
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We should applaud Mozilla for creating competition again in browserland and it is the only reason we have a new browserwars again and we are not stuck with a total dependence on activex or maybe silverlight for webdevelopment tied to just the one platform.
Also, I personally think, we should applaud Mozilla and Opera for starting the work on what now all these new and exciting webdeveloper features which is sometimes called just called ‘html5’. Because W3C was completely stuck
Waited out on this one – never tried any BETAs (I’m very happy with Chrome). I used Firefox as a backup browser – I needed a separate browser open with a different google login. However, even for that single thing, 3.6.x started to look outdated and crap compared to Chrome, and finally I installed the RC about four days ago. HUGE IMPROVEMENT!
So far I love it! It’s fast, it starts up fast, I like just about everything about the interface. Chrome has still more real estate (windows 7 default themes) but only by a few mm. Fonts do look different, they have a lot more contrast on FF – but I like it (I know some people don’t). They look sharper, more readable on my screen than my Chrome fonts.
This release cycle was so long, I started to give up hope, but oh yeah, FF4 is really nice. Almost tempted to switch back – the reason I don’t is that for me, Chrome works better with my phone (Nexus One) – sync of course (I know about ff sync) and some stuff like Chrome Send to Phone… Anyway, still – great job Firefox team! I was a skeptic (check my comments on FF4 related threads) but this release is very nice indeed!
Try Firefox Mobile for Android, it is -much- faster than the default browser and have 10x more features. The navigation is just a work of genius. It work without any dialogs or modes. You have hidden side panel you can access with 1 finger to switch tabs or access sync or the addons manager (yes, it have one) or the download manager (yes, it have one too).
AdBlock+Nexus = Win
Do you mean fennec? That has to be the worst mobile browser I’ve ever used.
Opera Mobile and the default browser are fine by me.
Fennec is dead. Firefox Mobile 4.0 is much faster. Mozilla said it was 1250% faster than the first beta (fennec +1)
cool, i’ll have to try the new one out then.
Well, just tried it… Nexus One, stock ROM, nothing fancy. Started up really slowly (Android thought it’s frozen, offered me to wait or quit – waited). Googled osnews – took about 5 times slower than default browser. When finally it loaded osnews I tried zoom in-out – it worked… then the page got stuck for several seconds (couldn’t scroll up or down). Tried different sites – slow like a snail, buggy as hell. Not nearly as good as the default browser… Also, 13 Mb???
Edited 2011-03-23 00:06 UTC
There’s a firefox extension equivalent to chrome2phone. It works pretty well. Just search for chrome2phone in firefox extensions.
Try Multifox (an add-on). It does exactly what you need in a single instance of the browser. It’s pity Firefox doesn’t come with such feature available out of the box (after all it’s said to be a user privacy oriented browser).
Currently Multifox UI is a bit flaky (sessions are assigned to numbers so you have to memorize which login goes with each number etc.) but the author has promised to rework this mechanism in the next version.
finally \o/
I tried the betas and the new release is just installed. But it will remain my second browser. The first spot wil be hard to break from opera 11. It is just that good.
Agree..Opera browser is deserving much more than it’s current 1% market share.
My favourite browser…
I feel your pain. I’ve been championing the Norwegian contender since ’98 – one day, one day, I hope.
I’m still surprised that Mozilla got IE from 95% marketshare down to 60+something in all those years and Opera gained so little at that time.
Maybe Opera wasn’t compatibility enough with IE or was it still the interface that just did not appeal to users ?
In the last few years they also lost the very large marketshare they had in Russia to Firefox:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-quarterly-200803-201101
After John Hicks (creator of the original Firefox logo) worked on the Opera interface it became a lot better.
I also can’t go with out Opera. Opera 11 is brilliant. Tab Stacking is a simple solution to a problem. I can’t say the same about the way Firefox solved the same problem, but I have not used it enough to decide if I like Panorama.
I would really like to see Opera do better with market share, and I don’t understand why it does not. When I tell people I don’t like Firefox (since 2.x) they look at me like I am crazy.
Well I will always have Firefox installed but it will not be my primary browser.
Tabstacking is probably better all though precision mouse movements can be tiring (RSI-like) not sure if that could be a potential problem.
Anyway the tabstacking came after what Mozilla did. Mozilla just had the very long release cycle.
I think Panorama does still need a lot more work to make it really perfect if you ask me, I think that is why it is not very prominent in the interface…
Am I the only one to think that FF 4 exhibits much resemblance to Opera? Too bad Opera doesn’t have a better market share.
I’m up to about seven crashes within three hours of use.. maybe four now? Half way through each post.. whammoo.. no more Firefox window. Thankfully, it seems to remember my tabs and input field values when restored but the novelty wore off after the third crash in the first hour of use.
Be nice if it rememberd my tabs between opening/closing as I’ve set it to do in the FF options.. that’d be kind of a nice feature to have.. actually recognizing and respecting it’s own config settings..
I am happy it’s here but it needs to become stable before it’ll touch any of my users and a version that actually works on Debian wuold be nice too (If not for html video, Iceweasel 3.6.?? would be fine but the html embeded video is turning up a lot more these days).
Got a whole lot of addons installed? Or gpu acceleration combined with flaky drivers?
Been using FF4 as my main browser since RC1, and even did a “tainted” install (using my old FF3.6 profile instead of creating a fresh one).
Haven’t had a single crash, even after keeping FF running for 12+ hours and doing a fair amount of browsing, tab opening/closing etc.
Two more crashes since I posted that comment and still no memory of my open tabs when FF is closed nicely and re-opened though the settings state “remember my open tabs and display then when re-opened”.
9 tabs open
9 addons in place (quincidence)
– calomel ssl validation
– download status bar
– download helper
– foxyproxy
– java
– .net (both of which install outside of the standard FF add-on repository.. boo MS and Oracle.. booo)
– noscript
– pentadactyle
– test pilot
Maybe Pentadactyle is conflicting with FF as the crashes have consistantly been mid way through inputing a comment. Either way, I’ve been sending a steady stream of crash reports back to FF if the pop-up tool is any indication.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Pentadactyl, it does sound like a plugin that could be burrowing a bit too deep into FF’s guts.
Try running with it disabled for a while and see if it has impact on the crashes – if so, blame Pentadactyl and not Mozilla
Will have to test when back on that machine with Win/FF4. It may be the vim overlay (pentadactile) as crashes seem to only happen when typing into a text box. If it is the plugin, I’m all about placing blame where due.
Now, the other question is why does FF4 keep forgetting my open tags even though I’ve now disabled and re-enabled the relevant privacy settings and default page action. This is rhetorical though as I haven’t yet check to see if other’s have the same issue or if it’s been reported already.
The odd thing is that FF4rc1 was rock solid as where the beta’s. This started yesterday with FF4rc1 continuing today with FF4 production release. I’d have expected pentadactile to have caused grief earlier as I’ve had it installed since the beta two previous to rc1. ah well, it’s a new version release. Like Debian 6, it’s still getting it’s post release polishing.
Hm, the tab-forgetting thing sounds weird!
Tabs re-apeared this morning based on what got closed out yesterday. With regular use, I should have it closed and opened a few times so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe crashing out blew away the memory before it could write a restore file or something. I’m willing to believe the two issues are related.
FWIW, I’ve never had that feature work as-advertised in any version of FF – it always remembered windows & tabs more reliably after crashing or when I forcibly-killed the process. But the SessionManager extension fixes that very nicely.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/
Cannot live without Session Manager. Donated some cash, too
There is hardly any difference between RC1 and the real release. It is just a few lines of code.
Maybe some addon was ‘fixed’ to work with Firefox 4 ? And thus is now enabled, but not before ?
You can probably restore your previous session by going to History -> Restore Previous Session
Doubt it.
Been using FF4 since B9 w/ Pentadactyl on Fedora 14 / x86_64 using unofficial RPM’s (from the Fedora Firefox maintainer) and thus far, I’ve only experienced a single crash since the B9 release.
– Gilboa
You’ve been lucky.. or I’ve been very unlucky.. probably the latter.
had another crash an hour ago just before removing Pentadactyle. (was banging a comment into another site’s forums when whammo.. and off goes a nother crasho notice to Mozilla). Still odd that the thing was rock solid until Monday..
If it craps out again, I’ll reinstall Pentadactyle as I’ve been only an hour now and am really missing good vim key bindings.
… I just checked.
I’m using the nightly Pentadactyl on 4 different machines w/ FF4.
However, here’s the thing: each uses a different version.
Guess its time to move back to the official Pentadactyl release and see if anything gets broken…
– Gilboa
Me neither and I actually use my browser all the damn time. Not a single crash or hitch. Though, maybe it has to do with the OS itself? I am running FF4 on Win7 64-bit and I got the impression OP was on Linux.
It could be the OS (or, rather, graphics drivers/ogl) if hardware acceleration is turned of. First, it’s a pretty new feature in FF and might not be entirely stable.
Second, 2D acceleration tends to exercise somewhat different code paths through the graphics stack than 3D acceleration does, and not all driver vendors have a clue
Win7/x64 here, GF460/GTX/1gig, 266.58 drivers.
Not sure what the OP is using, but I’ve got it running on both Win 7 and Archlinux here and have been using it since the betas. I keep it openn all the time too and have only had one crash back in beta 10, and that was caused by the Flash plugin (big surprise). What was surprising about that particular crash was that it happened on the win7 box and not on the Linux machine. Given the lackluster nature of the Linux flash plugin I would have expected that to happen the other way around. So I don’t think it’s Linux that’d cause the crash though, to be fair, there’s so many different possible setups of Linux that it could be any number of factors. I’d check add-ons first though, especially ones that haven’t been updated to be compatible with 4 properly but that still load anyway.
Mond FF4 rc1 on Win 32bit
Tues FF4 .0 on Win 32bit
We’ll see how today goes and if disabling the Pentadactyle plugin makes a difference.
Question for the site ops. When one mods up or down they can choose a reason. Is this reason actually displayed anywhere? I’m not so concerned that I’ve had comments modded down but I’d sure like to know the reason chosen. For example, was my complaining about FF4 modded down because other’s thought it was innacurate? Did other’s mistake it for trolling? Was it modded down because other’s simply didn’t like hearing reports of FF4 having issues? I mean.. if your going to provide the option to modd up/down with reason, shouldn’t those reasons be tabulated somewhere visible to the readers being modded? (Is it displayed somwhere and I’ve simply been missing it?)
Ssssh don’t tell anyone, but the reasons are totally bogus. We have access to who mods with what reason, and nobody respects it, nor did we expect anyone to. Can’t force people.
As such, exposing this information is bloody useless – it’ll only lead to more pointless meta-chatter. Don’t worry about individual comment scores or the occasional modded-down comment. Our algorithms are intelligent enough for that not to have an impact on anything.
Thanks for the response Thom. Fair enough. Either I’ve missed the answer to this question in the past or it’s been lost in amongs discussion posts.
I’d also be interested to know the reason for modding down my post directly above. it simply states facts. FF4 rc and .0 releases running on Win 32bit in response to someone asking what OS I was running FF4 on top of.. doesn’t seam innacurate, offtopic or otherwise justifying a down mod. This smells a whole lot like a slashdotter modding me down because they didn’t like reading facts.. meh.. not going to loose anymore cycles over it.. just a very timely example of things that make ya go “hmm…”.
Edited 2011-03-23 15:30 UTC
They are just basically saying they DONT LIKE what you are writing. It has nothing to do with truth or facts. I’m sure most votes are emotional here. You say something negative (even if it is only facts) about their favorite software/hardware/company and you will be voted down.
I do agree with this one. I seem to get upvoted quite often for some reason even when I say nothing worth upvoting, but when I make a comment about negative insights into e.g. Linux my comment instantly gets downvoted even if it is true. Especially anything other than ragingly positive comment about Linux in general or KDE gets downmodded instantly.
As such relying on the meta on comment votes wouldn’t really help much, people have shown clearly they ignore them anyways when voting. Why? I really have no idea. Whenever I vote someone I always try to pick the relevant option and I don’t vote someone just because I like or dislike the comment, I upvote comments which say something that is insightful or generally should be considered by larger audience, and I downvote trolling attempts.
Yeah, one really can’t take it personally. Especially with the voter doesn’t stick around to discuss the topic or difference of opinion. It get’s a big hairy “Meh”..
Very strange, I’m using it on a Mac and on an XP box from beta 1 or 2 without any crash, and now I’ve installed it also on my main Win 7 machine and it performs fine. Maybe it’s an add-on related issue?
Can you go to about:crashes and paste your crash links here? So we can have a look.
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox shows that Firefox 4 is very non-crashy on good systems, and that by far the main causes of crashes are malware. (Bad graphics drivers used to be a huge cause of crashes, until we managed to blacklist most of them)
I just installed FF4, it looks very good. The interface is very similar to Opera
Except Opera will actually allow you to move your tabbar to the left.
It just is not normal for FF to idle on a Flex based application website and be using 88% CPU on my Mac. Chrome v10 on the same Flex site uses 31% CPU.
This is just a continuation of more of the same… aesthetics are not worth a thing if FF kills my CPU while idling.
Giant FAIL for FF 4.
I wonder if Chrome is doing something to actively throttle flex? I would assume the plugin to be pretty much the same for both browsers, and Adobe isn’t exactly known for writing super decent code
Why was this modded down? Seems like someone has a legitimate complaint. Is that a troll in your book? If so please consult a dictionary, spend some time on usenet and relax a little.
Sounds like your Flex website is the giant fail, no website should be using any cpu when idling
Are you re-creating the entire document 60 times a second?
I don’t think he/she created the app.
But without knowing the name/function of the app it is really hard to get any idea of what is going on.
“Completely new user interface” is a straight-forward LIE. The only new things are the ability to move tab bar above the location bar and the new Firefox button which actually sucks big time and doesn’t work like one could wish.
Another “feature” is disintegration of the UI on Linux…
I wish to add that I really like the tab bar being above location bar, because it makes the browser look more sophisticated.
Edited 2011-03-22 18:13 UTC
Things that stayed the same from 3.6: search box, back/forward button. So not completely new but pretty close.
Panorama performance is horrible on my system, but that’s no biggie, as I rarely keep enough tabs open to need it.
Other than that, It’s a rock solid release. Firefox has returned it’s permanent spot on my taskbar (which Chrome held for the past 6 – 12 months).
It’s a shame that Panorama has such horrible performance on lower-end GPUs, since it’s such a nice feature. So much for their <sarcasm>GREAT</sarcasm> idea of implementing it mainly in javascript instead of native code.
Also, the tab zooming effect looks very pixelated – pretty lame.
I know, right?
There is absolutely no reason why performance should be that poor, apart from poor engineering. I could only imagine how bad it’d be if they DIDN’T revamp their JS engine.
I know my GPU was never top of the line even when the chip was first released, but damn. Even turning off animation, performance is horrible.
Yeah, it’s horrible.
Come on, Mozdevs, back in the days we could get moving translucent bitmaps even with raw unaccelerated framebuffer access.
And even if you can’t figure out how to do smooth scaling in software, even the oldest 3D accelerators you can get your hands on support bilinear filtering.
I think Panorama got very little ‘love’ from the developers, maybe they just left it up to the Userinterface guy or something.
Just for starters for over, what 4 months now ? They didn’t take the time to add support for moving tabs between windows.
According to Tom’s Hardware, IE9 and Chrome are kicking Firefox’s ass. But there’s still room for Firefox: Somebody has to fill the bargain bin …
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-9-chrome-10-o…
That test was done with Firefox 3.6.
Writing this from Firefox 4 on Arch Linux.
Thank you Mozilla/Arch developers.
Chrome still seems better at handling multimedia heavy websites.
I’ve also noticed that Firefox is more likely to stutter if you have a lot of tabs open.
I’m glad the finally improved the interface so it looks better in Aero but I don’t like how they copied Opera’s pull down menu. It sticks out too much. I also trust Chrome over FF for security.
Chrome launches subprocesses for each tab and extension while Firefox uses a single process. With Chrome, you’ll have 23 instances of chrome.exe for 23 tabs, and with Firefox, you’ll have 1 instance of firefox.exe for 23 websites, which is the reason for the stuttering and slow down.
The long button is much more Office 2010 then a circle. I like how people are figuring out they don’t need all of those buttons and toolbars, but I don’t like how they’re handling stuff like Adblock which I used to stick in the status bar. I’m glad the status bar is gone, but I liked using it as a dock for extensions.
Sure that helps but there are browsers that run in a single instance and don’t stutter with multimedia pages like Firefox. Even FF 2 seemed better at smooth scrolling.
There is too much junk in the trunk. They keep speeding up the javascript engine but overall responsiveness is degraded.
I’d have to disagree there, FF4 seems much more responsive than 3.x ever did to me. It’s not quite on par with Chrome, but much closer than it used to be.
If that was how you were using the status bar, you may want to try and enable the “Add-on Bar”.
I wonder when people will wake up and notice that 16:10 or 10:9 displays in landscape mode are far from optimal for daily work. It’s not like we are watching movies all days long, are we.
Enable the Extension Bar or Addons Bar, and you get the same result.
No complaints about not being able to play the video^aEUR| what a difference a few days make
Except this one
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?467564
Yayers! I’ve been looking forward to this release. I’d rather use Firefox than Chrome but up until now FF just hasn’t been up to the challenge.
I’ve only been using FF4 for a few minutes now but it seems really nice. Hopefully it stays this way.
I noticed at the end of the video Mozilla slipped in:
“As a non-profit, we answer only to you. And know you’re going to love the changes we’ve made.”
Well today, they’re more accurately described as a public-benefit organization rather than a non-profit. Unfortunately, they still have to abide by the contracts they have with search and information providers, which is responsible for the majority of their funding.
To bad they can’t just sell products (such as the Seabird phone) directly to consumers. Then they would definitely answer only to users.
Why would they not be able to do that ?
Are the Adblock Plus/Flashblock extensions already working with 4.0?
Yes.
…is that Firefox 4.0 is already in the quickly-approaching next version of Slackware, 13.37.
As if you haven’t guessed, no, I’m not too happy about Firefox 4. It seems like it’s copying off of Chrome in every way that it can, and I’m no fan of Chrome. Mozilla browsers were always great because they tended to be themselves, not try to be a complete ripoff of some browser that just happened to rise in popularity out of nowhere thanks to the backing of a massive corporation that can easily buy themselves market share.
That’s one thing I’ve noticed I don’t like about Linux, but it’s really shining right now (past example: KDE3 -> KDE4). You’re stuck with whatever versions of programs the distro gives you, but sometimes in the case of Web browsers–where one version can bring major, sweeping changes and bugs over the previous–this is not always good.
I also despised the “Awesome Bar” that Mozilla forced on its users in place of the traditional location bar and couldn’t stand Firefox 3 either, until I forced myself to create an army of bookmarks so the damn thing is usable, but that wasn’t until the 3.x series (IMO) got decent… around 3.5. With the latest openSUSE and other major distros shipping with pre-release versions just to jump ship first, I was hoping Slackware would be one of the few to stick to the tried and test 3.6.x, and it was looking good too… until the latest build, RC3.
Oh well. Looks like the time to consider alternatives has approached sooner than I thought… or I’ll have to wait and see if Firefox 4.0 eventually redeems itself in future versions. It’s mostly the extensions holding me back… AdBlock Plus, Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper, DownloadHelper, Download Statusbar, FireGestures, Ghostery, and NoScript are the major standouts… not all of which have fully functional equivalents in other browsers. I’m thinking SeaMonkey may be my best bet for compatibility, but I’m not a huge fan of its configuration interface, which last I checked doesn’t seem to have improved/changed much over the years.
This sucks…
If you think it’s copying Chrome, you should look at Opera.
The real question is, do you like or dislike the interface changes themselfs ?
Atleast in Firefox 4 (and I think Opera) you can choose to rearrange your browser pretty much the way it was before.
On Ubuntu I added the ‘mozillateam/firefox-stable’ ppa and I got Firefox 4 now instead of in a few weeks/months.
http://blog.jaybhai.com/the-tradition-continues-thanks-ie-team
Mozilla should’ve done the same for IE9’s release.
The cake is a lie.
I just got it, so far so good. The only thing is I can’t find the tool menu when I have the menu bar hidden
Edited 2011-03-23 01:33 UTC
You can always press ALT to show the original menu bar.
Thank you
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/firefox-4-bringing-webm-support…
“There’s a lot to love in Firefox 4 – better performance, hardware acceleration and a streamlined interface. All of that is great, but I’m here to talk about WebM support.
This is our first release to include support for WebM. We’ve been involved with WebM since it was launched and have contributed to its development. It’s been in our Mozilla Nightly builds for many months. As part of that, you’ll find WebM all over our sites. For example, the Firefox 4 What’s New video is in WebM. WebM Video is part of many of our awesome Firefox 4 demos. And if you’re part of the Youtube HTML5 beta, a large percentage of the videos you view will be delivered with WebM.
To understand why this is really important you need to understand global market share numbers for browsers. According to StatCounter, Firefox accounts for about 30% market share – or nearly a third of all browser users. When you combine that with Chrome and Opera it means that about 50% of internet users will have access to the high-quality WebM codec over the next few months, following the Firefox 4 adoption curve.”
In addition, as IE9 is slowly adopted amongst Win 7 and Vista users, a significant proportion of these users also could be expected to install the WebM Media Foundation codec provided by Google. That will help to boost the HTML5/WebM capable browsers to over 50%, but this part will be less significant than those people running Firefox or Chrome.
Just tried it, uses about 95MB showing google, compared to about 55 for Safari. Memory usage goes up form there Firefox memory usage grows quicker than Safari’s.
I doubt that, since all the benchmarks on the web that measured memory usage between the browsers show that Firefox uses the least amount of memory when showing ~5 pages or more. For less than ~5 pages sure, since Safari is a native browser and relies on native libraries it will have a smaller footprint than Firefox for the actual program.
But again when using lots of tabs Firefox has always emerged the winner with the smallest memory usage. Either way, there will certainly be new benchmarks done soon and we will see if this holds true with Firefox 4 aswell.
As for my impression, not that much new. The panorama thing never really appealed to me. The only thing I’ve really noticed is that it feels snappier and that the smooth scrolling which was nice before is now even nicer. I don’t do alot of heavy java stuff so the improved speeds there don’t impact me much. Overall a nice upgrade and all my extensions work (important!), Firefox remains my browser of choice.
Just to kind of balance out the comments here… I gotta say using Firefox 4 on the Mac my first impression is wow…
Check out
https://mozillademos.org/demos/dashboard/demo.html
*Fast Javascript
*Better layout: tabs, status bar
*HTML5 video (ie dont need flash anymore)
*CSS3 Transitions
*General speed improvments
A while ago I was bitching a lot about the delay, but I see why they got it late. Been using it since 2.X, I’m very satisfied with the results, using it on Linux only. The ribbon button is very cool, the tabs on top, the theme I’ve got makes it even nicer, all of my addons are compatible, some of the new I’ve installed do not require restart (thanks to Jetpack), speed improvements are noticeable in both UI and web pages, all other performance issues I’ve had are now gone. The Pin tab feature is very useful, the addon page is cool, overall, very positive feeling, well done Mozilla. No crashes, no memory issues (never had, actually).
For the next rounds of updates they want to make smaller releases: Firefox 5 in 3 months !
(less new features ofcourse)
And another 2 releases after that this year, I hope they can keep that ‘promise’.
I wish the new version was more mingw friendly (like Chromium). On the other hand I used it on OpenSuse 11.4 x64 and I am pleased. For my kind of use it does not feel that much different from 3.6.15. But the mingw compilation is a requirement for me.
The only real and important difference for everyday work I see is that the tabs are above the toolbar.
It’s a good browser, probably the best as we speak.
I’ve preferred Chrome for the last year or so but this new version of FF seems really nice. Speedwise is comparable. Definitely might be switching back to FF!
I’ve got to say I am no fan of the UI changes. Fortunately customization is still supported so I can hack my way back to a decent UI, but not without issues.
First, the bad.
#1 Statusbar gone.
Not just not enabled, gone. Yeah you can install status4evar, which is a substandard and partial reimplementation, but it’s nothing like having the thing natively there. The arguments for removing it never made sense to me. Once says “we’re freeing vertical space” but vertical space is infinite, so there’s no need, and you still need the new “add-on bar” for displaying tray icons provided by extensions (and most people have at least one of these). Why didn’t we just get it turned off by default with an about:config entry for flipping it back on? I’ll never understand decisions like this.
#2 Idiotic choices
In the quest to be cool like IE and Chrome a lot of well accepted UI has been thrown out. Lumping things in to weirdly nonstandard menus seems to be a new trend, started no doubt by MS Office 2007, which I hope developers will break away from soon. Furthermore, at some point some idiot decided that new tab placement should be broken.
#3 Tab misbehavior
I think Opera started it, but whatever the origin I see it now in Chrome, in Galeon, in Epiphany, and finally as the default in Firefox. Why in the world would I want the browser to try and guess at where to place tabs? A new tab goes on the far right, not somewhere in between my current tab and the far right. Maybe if you only have six tabs open it doesn’t matter to you where the 7th goes, but I absolutely rely on being able to predict where a new tab will go and thus the ordering of the global set of tabs. Fortunately this is a change you can still reverse…
#4 Upgrade oopses
My highly customized UI was partially lost in the upgrade. No big deal, right? The problem was that my address bar and search box were both in my menubar, which was unilaterally hidden by default. Figuring out what happened and how to reverse it was non-trivial for me and would be impossible for a lot of users. I was disappointed that the upgrade process didn’t note and work around such customization.
#5 Forced search
Try this: Open slashdot.org in Firefox 4. Hit CTRL+T, then type slashdot.org and hit enter. Where did your new tab go? That’s right, Firefox 4 guessed that you wanted to look at your *other* slashdot tab. This search-for-tab behavior could be useful, especially if you’re me and have 200+ tabs all the time, but to do it by default and without recourse is rather horrible. What’s next, switching and refreshing too, just in case I wanted newer content? This breaks my mental model of where I am in my tab-space, which is almost as bad as screwing with new tab location. There’s a bug filed about this which suggests adding the option to hold shift to restore the non-search behavior… ugh.
The good
#1 Pin as App
Oh my YES. Here’s one for the “giving me something I never knew I always wanted” category. Do you know how many times I’ve lost my gmail tab and had to spend ages searching for it, then had to CTRL+9 my way back to then end of my tab list (which is probably closer to where I was working)? Now I can have my workset and still flip in to and out of more persistent tabs. Fantastic.
#2 Tab grouping
Seems potentially useful, but not ultimately much different from multi-window. If the UI were less glitzy and more keyboardable that would help. I like that it’s completely unobtrusive: if you don’t care you can ignore it easily and it doesn’t get in your way (just like tab pinning). I’m waiting to see on this one, but eagerly.
Overall there’s a lot of stupid to dislike, but if my extensions are all supported I’ll definitely be upgrading. The extra tab management features and the usual performance improvements are too good to pass up without significant cause.
Edited 2011-03-23 12:21 UTC
[q]
#1 Statusbar gone.
its still there, in fact, its just like the one in chrome now – which is fine by me. better, in fact.
the only thing that is “gone” is that you don’t have a progress meter – imo it was useless because it cannot give a real estimation of the loading time
#2 Idiotic choices
You can revert to the old UI in ONE click so “oh well” applies.
#3 Tab misbehavior
have not had any trouble with that.
The status bar is in fact gone. The behavior of what you see in the status bar is not equivalent (hint: I use the status bar for more than seeing what a link target is). In any event, it is not “better” nor is the loading information useless. Gone is useful loading information beyond mere “progress”–if a page load hangs it’s impossible to know what hung it up. *You* may not have found the status bar useful, and I’ll bet it was you the mozilla developers were thinking of, but that’s no excuse for removing something that *I* rely on without even giving me the option of restoring it.
You cannot revert the UI with one click or, if you can, it is not at all apparent how. Perhaps this was a function of installing a beta or perhaps it was a function of my having customized my UI in unexpected ways, but either way it wasn’t possible.
The status-bar is just an add-on bar now.
Progress is ‘gone’, there was some progress-indicator at a small line below the address-bar at some point in the beta’s but it didn’t make it.
I’ve already seen some add-on developers change their add-on to move to the top somewhere instead of staying in the add-on bar.
I think the add-on bar is more for legacy add-ons.
“#1 Statusbar gone.
Not just not enabled, gone”.
Yeah, I agree fully. Quite a few things I’m hating about this release including the aforementioned status-bar and tab behaviour. Have used firefox for many many years but with this release it’s time to give Opera a good try I think. I really hate it that much and feel betrayed by the Mozilla devs for taking away the options! Oh well, out with the old and in with the new as they say.
It is really funny how you say you hate the interface as the interface looks sooo much alike to Opera:
http://dcm360.dyndns-ip.com/zpul/o-ff.png
Agree with most of your points. Your rationalisation for the statusbar is way off, though. The whole point behind freeing up vertical space is so that you don’t have to scroll. Saying that a page length can be near infinite does nothing to resolve the issue for people running netbooks and who can’t get a youtube video to fit in the available space.
The Chrome-style transient status popups would be all right, if:
– they all left-aligned; having half of them right-align just makes me head hurt
– they natively skinned on *nix
– there was a popup progressbar to at least give me a ballpark estimate of how loaded a page is.
Also want to add my own complaint: the slow crawl towards forcing you into a single window is progressing. The add-on manager now appears as a tab. The Expose clone adds a grouping feature which makes multi-window tab grouping redundant. I get the distinct impression that by version 5 or 6, I’m not going to be able to break out of the main window. As someone who doesn’t even use tabs, that’s concerning.
22px at the bottom of the screen rarely makes a difference in “have to scroll” vs “don’t have to scroll.”
Having a different browser UI for a netbook would be okay by me, but why cripple my desktop with 1280 pixels of vertical resolution?
The chrome-style transient stuff is frustrating because sometimes the information is here-and-gone too quickly.
Actually, yeah, it does. More so as screen resolution varies and more so again as defaults become ever more obese with OSes like Win 7. But, hey, don’t let that get in the way of pixel creep: ‘it’s only 22px’ http://roffletech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/ie-toolbar-bloat.j…
Who said anything about crippling the statusbar? There was no need for Mozilla to gut the statusbar code in order to support transient status popups. Just because they did, that does not make an argument against transient status popups.
My argument is that transient popups are a reasonable hack for screens without much resolution but wholly inappropriate for screens with a high resolution. Making a low-res UI optimization the default for high-res makes no sense.
I am against toolbar nonsense as much as the next guy, probably far more so, but there’s a difference between yet-another-space-consuming-toolbar-of-questionable-utility and the status bar, which has been fundamental to browser UIs for so long. Perhaps my carefree attitude about vertical space can be explained by the way I customize Firefox’s UI to eliminate all unnecessary vertical space.
See: http://fraglimit.net/ffss.png
If I had all my FF3 extensions working the menu bar would also have a few menus removed (bookmarks and history) and a button added (delicious).
The point is not that 22px here or there doesn’t matter but that for the status bar an argument of “might cause unnecessary scrolling” is weak. As long as there is sufficient vertical space in the content frame the rest is gravy. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to do a trivial “how big?” check and disable the status bar when you find yourself under 800px of vertical content space when the browser starts.
And visa versa. A quick check on w3schools reveals that ~28% of people using the web have 1000px or > display resolutions and the distribution is pretty varied. ~42% of people are around the 700-800px vert res range. The percentages don’t appear to include mobile use, unless they’re under the 10% ‘Other’. This doesn’t even count the minority who take advantage of their desktop window management and don’t maximise every god damn window. You’re engaged in special pleading.
You and I know how to use computers – presumably. Most people do not and Firefox has long since ceased being the exclusive domain of geeks. The statusbar isn’t of ‘questionable utility’ for most of FF’s userbase?
For someone whom I largely agreed with, you’re doing a wonderful job of ensuring that I eat my words. Two counts of special pleading and now an appeal to tradition. Dude, not cool.
It’s not simply a “we’ve always done it that way” – if I wanted to say that I could object to any change. The status bar in the browser provides useful information which I think is necessary, and, yes, useful for a majority of users. I wasn’t attempting to argue pedigree, merely to say that the statusbar isn’t some experimental feature. It’s standard, like the address bar or the forward button. Most users don’t really care about URLs, either, but I still think the address bar is a necessary feature. It’s not an aberration, it’s a standard feature (as is the status bar). If you dismiss this as “But we’ve always had a status bar!” then you’ve missed the point I was trying to make. What is the justification for removing it? If it’s just to accommodate low res UIs….
I don’t think it’s “special pleading” to call for a UI that makes sense. I didn’t try to claim that high-res was more normal, I merely said that if a UI change is being made to accommodate small resolutions and it doesn’t make sense for large resolutions then it should not be applied to large resolutions. If this is special pleading then it is also such to suggest that a special UI be adopted for low-res; if one size doesn’t fit all (IMO it doesn’t) then it should adapt.
Where to start. You never really established that the statusbar is ‘necessary’, somehow ended up defending the address bar and kinda contradicted yourself, considering the statusbar’s primary functionality is to show users something that ‘most users don’t really care about’.
If I’m reading this correctly, I couldn’t agree more. My argument was never that unilateral changes should be forced upon all users for the sake of small screens, merely that your own reasoning failed because it could be equally used to argue such.
I was not attempting to “prove” the necessity of the status bar. All of the above is my opinion, which includes “the status bar is something everyone needs whether they know it or not.” If Mozilla (or any software developer) does things with which I disagree without providing a clear justification that is convincing to me then they are in the wrong.
I’m not sure how clarifying that you’re expressing an opinion changes anything. I mean, that’s stating the obvious, nothing more; there was never any contention. Never mind that you expect ‘clear justification’ from a 3rd party, to sway you from a position you’ve arrived at without, seemingly, the same rigour. That seems a tad self-serving.
On a related note I will say this: When I began using the betas there were no transient popups. I installed status4evar to restore the status bar. Between the time of my original post in reply to yours and now I have had a chance to see what the released FF4 is like and see what you mean by “transient popups.” These popups are chrome-like but better and make my objections largely irrelevant; I was basing my comments on “no statusbar” vs “statusbar”, and the former has serious deficiencies that the transient popups do not share (since the popups present all of the same information as the statusbar).
So, that was my mistake. I still think that removing the status bar was a mistake, but at least it is no longer a regression in functionality.
Tab misbehavior
Try “Tree Style Tab” extension. It is awesome.
I think Opera started it
NetCaptor 1998
Amiga’s IBrowse 1999
Opera 2000
I’d rather have the defaults be correct. At any rate, I already know how to fix the broken behavior.
Ah, interesting. Thanks. I used NetCaptor but did not note this at the time; I guess I didn’t use it as much as Opera.
Agreed, that one’s annoying. IIRC, there’s a way to restore it through about:config – but even then, it doesn’t display the URL you mouseover the link (that still uses the Chrome-style pop-up).
This one I don’t really mind. I’ve often run into situations where I have (E.g.) 20 tabs open and I Ctrl-click a link in tab #2 – then have to hunt for the new tab. With the change, I can ctrl-click a link and always be a ctrl-tab away from the new tab.
It would be nice if it were a bit more consistent, though (and/or configurable). E.g. ctrl-click opens a new tab to the right the current tab – but ctrl-t opens a new tab to the right of the last tab.
Agreed there – it’s a nice idea, but the TabHunter extension implements the same functionality in a much more useful/usable way.
”
#5 Forced search
Try this: Open slashdot.org in Firefox 4. Hit CTRL+T, then type slashdot.org and hit enter. Where did your new tab go? That’s right, Firefox 4 guessed that you wanted to look at your *other* slashdot tab. This search-for-tab behavior could be useful, especially if you’re me and have 200+ tabs all the time, but to do it by default and without recourse is rather horrible. What’s next, switching and refreshing too, just in case I wanted newer content? This breaks my mental model of where I am in my tab-space, which is almost as bad as screwing with new tab location. There’s a bug filed about this which suggests adding the option to hold shift to restore the non-search behavior… ugh.
”
It doesn’t work as you say, for me. It goes where it should (creates a new tab). Disable: browser.urlbar.autoFill -> had the same problem as you with this turned on.
This doesn’t disable the forced searching it just makes the jump option take over the first choice in the suggested URL list.
“The video is HTML5 video in WebM, which only works in browsers that support this open standard (Chrome, Firefox 4.0, and Opera 11). You can watch this video in Internet Explorer 9 using Google’s Media Foundation codecs. You can always download the source file and play it in your favourite media player. Alternatively, you can watch the video in the closed H264 format at Mozilla.com.”
…but you have flash advertisements that help pay for your site costs! o.O
I don’t see much difference in the UI from previous versions. “Tab on top” is a little annoying to enable by default, just because I am used to tabs being on bottom. And the status bar thing… why? The improved performance is great, though. Firefox 4 really does start and load faster! Sort of. I’m not going to pretend that I care how it works, but most news sites don’t load fast. CNN and FoxNews take quite a bit of time to load. While nerd news sites (OSAlert, Slashdot, Ars Technica) load very quickly. Who has the time to read all that news anyway? It hasn’t crashed on me yet. I haven’t even had a plugin crash yet! I like Firefox 4.
.
Edited 2011-03-23 23:37 UTC
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/
The adoption rate of Firefox has always been quite high. For Firefox 3.6 it was higher, but the download rate for Firefox 4 in the first day was still apparently more than twice that of IE9.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/statcounter-firefox-4-has-already-…
Edited 2011-03-23 23:33 UTC
See link for animated counter of Firefox 4 downloads:
http://glow.mozilla.org/
Apparently, Firefox 4 dowloads reached 7 million in the first 24 hours.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Firefox-4-downloads-approach…
Firefox 3.6 did better with 8 million on its first day, which is a bit strange considering that Firefox 4 is bigger improvement over the previous version than Firefox 3.6 was.
IE9 was apparently downloaded about 2.7 million times on its first day. Firefox 4 has already overtaken IE9 installed share.
Well that shouldn’t be a surprise given that IE9 is Win7/Vista only.
Whose fault is that?
Who does this limitation of IE9 help?
Does it even help Microsoft?
Makes support easier. Who wants to do additional testing and QA on older platforms? Nobody, that’s who.
The biggest issue with Microsoft IE installations is, people are scared it will mess up their windows installation and can’t uninstall it when things go wrong, etc.
But again who’s fault is that to integrate IE in Windows.
(actually a PR point from them: even better Windows integration with IE9 !)
3.6 had a large media plug for their special download day record.. Firefox 4 did exceptionally well with little of the same PR.
Firefox 4 overtook IE9 ? IE9 never had much of a marketshare, see my other comment:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?467698
If you really want to compare IE9 and FF4 user count, here are some numbers:
There are more ff4 beta/rc users in the past months then currently ie9 users.
After the release IE9 almost got twice the number of users still less than the ff4 beta/rc users. When ff4 was released the number of ff4 users trippled (so that is 3x).
These are real users, not just downloads. This is from the stats from Statcounter.
Feels marginally slower than Chrome, but no biggie (or even speedier at some specific things.)
Does everything that I want without the bunch of small annoyances that I experienced with Chrome.
I have found Panorama to be extremely useful… and cool as well….
Firefox is my browser of choice for years.