Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people - WC Fields
|
|
|
Firefox 4 first impressions
OPEN SOURCE software developer Mozilla has big hopes that Firefox 4 will maintain the momentum of its most popular product, and so far the results are looking good.
If you are a current Firefox user, the decision to update really is a no brainer. For Mozilla, the question is whether this major release will help it maintain and grow its web browser market share. It's a question that will be answered by more than just fancy user interfaces, that is, in the underlying technology used to render websites.
For Mozilla, completing Firefox 4 can't come soon enough. In the last two years it has taken some hits from Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and recently even Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9. Google in particular has gone down the route of almost constant beta updating backed up by an advertising campaign, which has seen it enjoy some market share growth at the bleeding edge.
It isn't the growth of Firefox's rivals that got Mozilla worried, but rather the sense that Firefox had grown bloated and slow that would have got alarm bells ringing. On first impressions it looks like Mozilla has listened.
With a prolonged beta testing period, it was clear that when Firefox 4 did finally arrive there wouldn't be too many surprises. By the time Mozilla released the 12th and final beta, Firefox 4 had a polish about it that many software firms would find hard to achieve after a year of production patches and updates. The long beta cycle was a good idea, as Mozilla released a new version of the Gecko rendering engine and an updated Javascript engine called Jaegermonkey.
What users will notice first is the relocation of tabs from below the URL bar to above it, however in reality that is the most unimportant change of all, because it is Jaegermonkey that holds the key to Firefox's success. Coding purists might view Javascipt with disdain, but the truth is that the performance of a web browser's Javascript engine is vital to the overall user experience and, on that front, Mozilla has made significant strides.
Benchmarking Firefox 4 against Firefox 3.6.12 on a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, the Spidermonkey Javascript benchmark was completed in 277.3ms on Firefox 4. Compare this to 839.4ms on Firefox 3.6.12 and you start to realise that Mozilla hasn't spent the last two years simply working on the eye candy aspects of the Firefox 4 user interface.
Aside from Jaegermonkey, Mozilla's Gecko 2.0 engine improves support for HTML5, CSS3 and WebM. Firefox 4 has had hardware acceleration since its fourth beta release, however it still supports only Windows 7. That's a big disappointment for a web browser that is bundled with almost every Linux distribution.
Tags: Software
Share this:
Share
Most of my favorite add-ons wouldn't work. I was losing memory like crazy (Win7 64) and rendering my most common URLs was flaking out plus taking way too much time. Also, the new default font was a strain on my eyes (1680x1050) and very uncomfortable to look at. I went back to 3.6 after doing a complete reinstall. After the bugs are worked out of version 4 in a few months I will try it again but 4.0 was a big let down.
SR Ware Iron is No1 still. Gave up on ferrets when I discovered SRWare's stellar effort with the ET-call-home Goog's Chrome
Breaks plug ins.
Does not warn when closing a ton of tabs or the browser window - regression.
Uses huge amounts of CPU.
This thing is terrible.
I love the plug-ins available for Firefox and have about a dozen installed. I hope your full review will discuss how much the new v4 "breaks" these and / or what the outlook is for compatibility. I really don't want to go to v4 if I lose the plug-ins.
WORKS BETTER ON MY SUPER COMPUTER.
Managed to get all of Opera's functionality (speed dial, mouse gestures, tab recycle bin, irc) with add-ons so i may switch over since Opera has problems with some pages
New UI very similar to Opera. I appreciate that Alt key summons classic menu for old-timers. I do not appreciate the two-column menu from the new button, which Opera dropped before finalizing the O menu. A bit irritated that doubleclicking the title bar does not open a new tab.
There are some factually incorrect statements in this article.
Example from the ff4 site:
"Whether you’re using Windows 7, Vista, XP or Mac OS X with Firefox 4, you’ll also enjoy hardware acceleration for many common operations"
And linux had issues with some cases so they disabled it by default in the beta then enabled it again, and I'm not sure where it stands now in the default but it is available on linux but might be buggy for some.
As for the tabs being relocated, there's a simple menu option to put them back down if you wish.
If FF4 doesn't fix that annoying extension subsystem memory leak on Windows 7 64-bit, I think I'll permanently switch to Chrome. Suffering 1GB memory usage after a day or so of use, requiring a full exit is plain ridiculous. If I can't even use the extensions, why should I even bother with Firefox at all?
I use IE7-9 at work because they are the primary target browsers for my company's web apps. We also target Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but I only do spot checks on these and let the testers find the other bugs.
We are getting pretty good at developing code that targets IE, but also runs without problems on the other browsers.
I use Opera at home because it has the best interfaces for bookmarks and tabs and it is plenty fast, though Firefox 4 and Chrome have probably surpassed it.
I find Chrome / Safari irritating with their Mac-like interfaces and lack of a drop-down for urls. Until about six months ago both web-kit browsers were prone to rendering mistakes. Firefox has always been close to or even superior to IE in rendering accuracy, but got very slow about the same time IE7 also got bogged down with hastily applied patches, so I switched to Opera for home use.
I rarely have to use Firefox for some commercial sites instead of Opera, but it does a much better job of rendering than it used to. But the friendly interfaces (like Ctrl-z to reopen an accidently closed tab) are just a great pleasure to use so I don't see myself switching any time soon.
IMHO, 'way too many changes in the "look and feel" of the browser.
'Spent over a half-hour reconfiguring so it has some semblance of v3.6.x... and speed improvements? Did they get that 'cause the default config uses over a GIG of cache?
'Sad that they will probably -lose- market share by making it unrecognizable to long term users.
.
I HATE tabs up the top. I find them much easier to use if they're right above the view window.
Opera "a competent web browser that doesn't have a killer feature to attract users outside its dedicated followers"...
Doesn't have a killer feature? Well, if it had one - I'm sure others would quickly copy it, as they did with almost all killer features now available to the market. But wait - it has an integrated mail client, IRC, widgets and IS fast and snappy enough as it is. You didn't know that did you? I bet most of you (reviewers) don't even actually bother to test it properly.
You run your set of JavaScript benchmarks (written by no other than Google, Mozilla/GNU community and Microsoft) and conclude it is not fast enough, therefore unworthy. But you bluntly FORGET to test: how do these browsers handle concurrent connections, AJAX, scrolling and zooming, accurate rendering of an (in)complete HTML body and many more "little" things that actually reflect the real world experience in our congested WWW.
All that Opera lacked all this years was a marketing machine like Google or M$ to promote it to the mass as with the others, so that you can finally have an excuse ($$$) to test it like you should...
P.S. And YES, Firefox also had been promoted by Google for a while.
Of course it has killer features like Opera Sync,Speed Dial Turbo and the Torrent.
However there is no iconic leader to tell us we need them.
For existing FF users getting V4 as soon as possible is likely to involve having a bunch of add-ons that no-longer work. Far better to hang back a while and let a few early adopters discover the missed bugs.
I believe the 20th century artisan, Betty Boo, articulated it the best when she said of Firefox, "fat and ugly thing get in my way!"