Hacker News Reader

Comment by fliph | Hacker News Reader

Changes noticed on Mac since Beta 6:

* The stop/reload button has moved to the right end of the URL bar.

* The status bar is gone; URLs appear in ghosted text on the right side of the URL bar when you hover over a link.

* You can enable an "add-on bar", which appears to be a replacement status bar that add-ons can add icons to. None of the add-ons I have installed (about 20) are making use of it, so the transition from overlaying the status bar to overlaying the add-on bar must not be automatic.

* In the Add-ons Manager, an explicit "Remove" button has replaced the small "X" icon that used to be used for uninstalling an add-on.

* A more colorful throbber.

View on HN

The performance is much better. I’m getting sub-one second app launch times, page load is much faster than safari, page render is comparable.

The app is still a bit of a bad citizen in that it doesn’t have any of the native text views allowing for system spell-check or any of the system services, and the app’s cpu usage still runs at 4% with no windows open (expected behavior is that windowless apps use 0)

And to be pedantic, there’s something still Java-y about the interface. Fonts are just a little bit bigger in places, and the main bar, despite being 7px smaller than safari’s (amazing feat, firefox dev’s) still feels chunkier.

Weird things in the interface vein: The feedback button’s dropdown hangs left automatically. Proper system behavior is to drop it down to the right, and then push it left based on the monitor’s viewport. The textfield resize grab changes the mouse cursor.

Weird stuff like that. Since it’s a beta I can understand the rough edges strapped to the oversized V12 engine. I still have nightmares about trying to run Firefox 2 on Tiger in 2005 or so.

There have been significant advances to the underlying code, see this post here by Josh Aas, Gecko platform software engineer with Mozilla Corporation:

http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/firefox-4-fo...

I think moving the status bar to the location bar was a bad idea. The area in and around the location bar is already quite cluttered so I don't see the point. In many cases the bar isn't even big enough for the entire URL of the link being hovered over, unlike when it was in the status bar.

At least it kinda looks nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com