Firefox 4 Whats your thoughts?

**grynge** · March 24th, 2011, 9:40 PM

So I have been using firefox 4 for about a day now. (I don't have time to test trial beta's these days so only trial full versions)

My first impression was "damn that's quick to open"
Quickly followed by "damn where the hell is everything"

They have moved everything the tabs are up the top (you can move them below).
My bookmarks are over on the right hand side
To open a new tab it is now the top menu item not the second
There is a new orange firefox pull down menu which seems to be like offices round circle thingy that holds all the information. You can also pin tabs as well now. So no need for a plugin to do it.
About 40% of my plugins don't work and I have to recode all my personal plugins to work out why they aren't working or why they aren't being turned on by the system.

Honestly I don't like the new look but I am sure it will grow on me. I am sure there is either a skin or you can turn the look back in time.

The speed is impressive, not sure it's as fast as chrome but definitely a huge difference from 3.6 to 4. So far even firebug hasn't had a memory leakage. But then I haven't tried any really cool dodgy sites yet.

My overall thoughts, so far the speed is worth the effort of upgrading. If it doesn't have that problem with memory leakage then I think I will upgrade all my tools and then all my computers.

**hooperman** · March 25th, 2011, 3:25 AM

Just downloading it now. I usually wait until upgrades are forced on me, but I'll give this one a whirl now.

Originally Posted by grynge

To open a new tab it is now the top menu item not the second

Did you know you can press CTRL-T to open a new tab?

**grynge** · March 25th, 2011, 3:36 AM

Originally Posted by hooperman

Did you know you can press CTRL-T to open a new tab?

yeah I did but it's not always the easiest way for me.

**hooperman** · March 25th, 2011, 4:30 AM

I like the App Tab feature: you can "pin" URLs that you go to a lot (gmail, Twitter etc) so they appear as buttons permanently next to the address bar. It does seem to be faster, but that might be me being suggestible.

I'm running Windows XP on this machine though, so I don't get to see that nice orange firefox button.

**Andy** · March 25th, 2011, 5:48 AM

Dang! Talk about early adopters! Saw the download for the first time yesterday and ALMOST considered trying it. I'm a creature of habit so I don't like things changing on me.

I never really got the hang of Firebug so I stopped using it. Is it worth trying it again?

Andy

**grynge** · March 25th, 2011, 6:14 AM

Originally Posted by Andy

Dang! Talk about early adopters! Saw the download for the first time yesterday and ALMOST considered trying it. I'm a creature of habit so I don't like things changing on me.

I never really got the hang of Firebug so I stopped using it. Is it worth trying it again?

Andy

This machine is a test machine that I play with a lot of stuff, hearing on the grapevine how fast 4 beta was when it became final I decided to try it out.
If you code a lot firebug is just magic but then chrome has it built in as well. So far I still haven't had a memory leakage a full day of browsing and still only 300meg of ram used. It seems to clean the memory when you close a tab, flash and javascript was the worse so I have been playing around with youtube/adobe/vimeo/facebook etc etc and a lot of the java tools sites. I am impressed so far.

**grynge** · May 17th, 2011, 6:31 AM

After a couple of months using Firefox 4 I am loving it.

It has a paste and go, paste and search, and an Open Link which make the enter key nearly redundant. What these do are quite simple but very useful, you can copy and paste a link in the address bar and with paste and go it will automatically press enter for you, if you copy and paste something and put it in the search bar it will automatically press the enter key for you, and if an url is written on a page with no html coding you can highlight it and it click open link which will open up that link saving any copy and pasting in the address bar.

Some old time add-ons still don't work, but I can live without most of them, I was able to recode all my personal tools to work without too much trouble. The memory leakage seems to be fixed and flash doesn't seem to crash it like the old 3.6 and earlier versions. The most memory I have seen it swallow up is about 512meg. I have 10 tabs open right with 3 separate flash games and its only using 374meg

It is definitely faster booting (though not as fast as chrome) it works on more websites than chrome does. (I haven't used ie for several years so I can't compare to ie9)

I have now updated all my computers to use it and all my employees are now using it as well.

Unless there is a tool that you just can't do without I would say it's definitely worth the upgrade.

**Saul** · May 17th, 2011, 11:06 AM

I've installed the update recently. It's looking more and more like Opera. A few more versions and what you do know, you might not even tell a difference. I'm sticking to the real deal though (Opera).

**Clinton** · May 17th, 2011, 2:15 PM

I use Opera as well, but it doesn't work on as many sites as FF and IE. I can't log into sections of this server that I normally use a browser for, I have to switch to FF.