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Firefox 4 RC now available

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107 pointsjlongster116 comments

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I'm used to Firefox 3.6 on Win7. There are a few reasons why it's my go-to browser when I'm using Windows:

1) Plug-ins like Firebug, web dev toolbar, greasemonkey, and resizeable textarea

2) Tabs are well-placed and readable, and you can simply double-click next to tabs to open a new tab

3) A proper status bar that's always visible

4) A full menu bar

5) No Adobe Flash built-in

I've installed Firefox 4 RC. The colors are loud. Tabs are on top, tab text is illegible, and double-clicking next to tabs doesn't create a new tab (it simply resizes the browser window). The status bar and the menu bar are gone. I couldn't even find Firebug and Greasemonkey.

Luckily, a few of these unfortunate decisions can be reversed. Apparently, you can turn on an "add-on bar" to show the controls for Firebug and Greasemonkey. You can also opt for a top menu bar, which has the added benefit that it re-enables the "double-click to create new tab" behavior.

IMHO, the new UI sucks balls. If Mozilla wanted to copy Chrome/Safari's UI, they've succeeded.

EDIT: After viewing some of my websites in Firefox 4, I must say that CSS3 and text rendering is a lot better than in FF 3.6. From what I can tell, it's on par with Chrome. I just wish it didn't have its UI as well.

Right click on a UI button and disable tabs on top + enable the menu bar. Firefox isn't Chrome -- it doesn't force you into its workflow or mode of thought.

Thanks for the tip, it does help. I've since edited my comment.

>Firefox isn't Chrome -- it doesn't force you into its workflow or mode of thought.

Yes, it does, it's just a different mode of thought. Chrome is far less configurable than Firefox, and has some features than drive me mad - like the position of a newly opened tab.

I don't think we're disagreeing :)

> If Mozilla wanted to copy Chrome/Safari's UI, they've succeeded

They haven't succeeded because they still see the need for both a search box and an address box and the tabs don't close right under where the last close button was (my biggest gripes).

the tabs don't close right under where the last close button was

It's not really a fix, but as a less-aggravating workaround, you can use ctl-w or ctl-F4 to close tabs. That way you don't have to reposition the mouse every time you want to close a tab. And I can hit ctl-w with my left hand, so I still don't have to take my right hand off the mouse to use the keyboard shortcut.

Don't forget middle-click tabs to close.

Yeah, I'm disappointed that our fix for the latter [1] didn't end up landing in time for Firefox 4. I'm hoping to release it as an add-on, and it has a very good chance of making it for the next release 3 months down the road.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465086

The nice thing about the separate search box is the corresponding list of available search engines.

I much prefer Chrome's approach, where it remembers sites you've visited that have a search bar (IMDB for example). If I start typing 'im' and press tab it changes into a search box for that site.

Can you explain what's nice about that (compared to alternatives)?

1. I can drop-down the list of available search engines and see what's available, without having to remember any key-words to do the searches.

2. (and this is the killer feature for me) If a particular search engine is selected (say, IMDB), I can right-click on any word on a page, and one of the context menu options is "Search IMDB for <selection>..."

Also, horizontal real-estate is not much of a concern on a wide-screen monitor - how much of the URL would I really want to see..?

Firefox keyword search is better and doesn't take up real estate.

I remove the close buttons from tabs as they waste space. Use middle-click to close instead and there is no need to worry about their location. Ctrl-W works too.

The need is simple: The search box sends what you type in it to your search provider immediately. So if they're combined, there's no way to type a url without your search provider knowing what URL you typed.

Now maybe you're OK with that. But a lot of users are not (including non-technical users who don't even realize this behavior exists; once you explain what the unified bar does to them they become _very_ unhappy).

That is interesting, but most people I know type "facebook" in google to get a link to facebook, so I don't know if that's the case.

> No Adobe Flash built-in

How is that a reason not to use Firefox over Chrome? Plugins can always be disabled, and if it's the principle of having proprietary stuff in your browser that you dislike, you can always choose Chromium, which doesn't include Adobe Flash or the PDF viewer, among other things.

I'm fine with proprietary tech, but Adobe Flash and Acrobat are unsafe, buggy and drive my CPU mad.

After reading your comment, I have once again searched for a setting within Chrome to remove the built-in Flash, but I can't find it. That leaves Chromium and Iron.

I'm not sure that you can remove it, but you should be able to disable it through the about:plugins page. The long way around is through Options->Under the Hood->Plugin-ins->Disable individual plugins.

The same goes for any Acrobat plugin you may have, though I think Chrome's built-in PDF viewer supersedes Adobe's.

Even better, turn on "click to enable". It's a blast not having Flash ever run unless I specifically allow it.

"Under the Hood" is replaced by "Under the Bonnet" for UK users, which to my mind shows remarkable attention to detail. (I wonder what else differs between en-gb and en-us...)

You can reenable the status bar with the Status-4-Evar extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...

The status bar can be turned on (and off) with Ctrl+/ (Ctrl+Slash). This takes care for the main issue for me.

The other issue I see is the the styling of the status bar, which seems incomplete. I added some additional styling to my userChrome.css and the bar now looks decent. (In Windows 7 with the Classic Windows theme.)

    #browser-bottombox {
        border-top-color:   #808080 !important;
        border-top-style:   solid !important;
        border-top-width:   1px !important;
        padding-right:      16px !important;
    }

I just tested on Mac and Windows 7 and even with tabs on top, double clicking in empty space next to tabs will open a new tab. If that doesn't work for you, I would recommend considering it a bug and filing it on bugzilla. It might be an incompatibility with an add-on or a preference setting, but there is no harm in reporting it.

Double-click tabbar new tab seems to have been broken, however oddly I can get it to work with middle-click.

Serious question here... I now use Chrome, my parents use Chrome, and almost everyone I know has converted. Most HN users seem to use it too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105954.

Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

I'm loving working with IndexedDB. For some reason haven't been able to get my Chrome nightly to play nice with my site but it runs like a charm in FF4. For one, FF uses less vendor prefixes for IndexedDB. I'm not sure if that's my issue but it seems to make FF easier to work with given that when learning IndexedDB there are precious few resources out there aside from the spec.

There is some great discussion and excellent examples of using indexedDB in both Chrome and Firefox in this blog post from Mike West, Google evangelist:

http://mikewest.org/2010/12/intro-to-indexeddb

It's actually about as fast as Chrome now. Too little too late in my opinion, but at least it's fast enough that it won't actively piss me off when I need a second browser open for some reason.

Yeah, for a while now I have used firefox in kind of I need a quick environment free of cache and cookies to test if what I'm seeing is right.

Isn't that the point of Chromes ctrl-shift-T incognito mode?

i wouldn't quite say it's the point...

That's exactly how I used Chrome until just recently. With 'fox's wider adoption (at the time) and my attachment to it, it took a while to switch.

Well, I guess you could look at it the other way, with firefox 4 being released is there much in chrome that provides a significant advantage to the end user? Sure Chrome has iterated faster and as a result the current Chrome is a lot better than FF3.6, is this the case with 4 now though?

Well no, you can't look at it that way. The fact that Chrome is no longer significantly better is hardly a reason to get excited about FF4 :)

I disagree. There are 400-450 million Firefox users that absolutely will benefit in huge ways from this update. There may have been a time for a while there where some chunk of those users felt like Chrome could offer them more, but that time is gone now.

I'd go a step further and say that now there are going to be an increasing number of Chrome users who will compare to Firefox 4 and want the performance and feature improvements that it has over Chrome and that may hold true for some time.

So, yes, you could look at it that way.

well there is one thing. its faster. I like the new look its more wide screen friendly.

basically because of adblock plus and firebug i did newer jump on chrome bandwagon and i really like the firebox 4.

Graphics acceleration via OpenGL on Mac or Direct2D on Windows is a big one. Chrome doesn't have either in stable builds.

Firefox has a more customizable interface. You can hide or move any button or bar.

Pentadactyl (http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/index).

FF4 is fast and feature rich. Try out Chrome and FF4 on this site:

https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/

There doesn't have to be only one browser, right? We want a few great implementations of the open standards.

Second that, and it's awesome that the two best are both available on Linux. I go back and forth every few weeks.

There's a lot to be excited about. Chrome is a respected contender, but it is far from perfect, not everyone uses it, and I'm not sure why Chrome users think it's some divine creation. It's good to have more than one awesome browser.

In addition to all kinds of new HTML5 support, there's hardware acceleration, awesome SVG support, robust Audio API, and Panorama (press cmd+shift+e).

+ Firefox Sync - I can restore open desktop tabs on my android device when I am on the go

I'd used Chrome exclusively for almost two years before the Fx4 beta cycle, and now I'm back on Fx full-time. I don't have time to get into the details, but Fx 4 is really a large improvement over 3.6.x.

Ditto. And I stuck with Chrome until Xmarks started giving me grief. Upgraded to the FF beta about three months ago, and really liked the improvement over 3.6. Even when the Xmarks / Chrome thing sorted itself out, I found that wasn't reason enough to go back. I've also started using a privacy plug-in called Cocoon (also in beta) that I'm really pleased with. Currently, it's FF only.

One other thing. It's small, and non technical, but I find I really like the very compact implementation of the pin tab feature. The way FF adds subtle indicators when the content on a pinned page updates is especially nice.

> The way FF adds subtle indicators when the content on a pinned page updates is especially nice.

I'm on Chrome 10.0.648.127 and it does a periodic glow when pinned content has been updated. It's a little too subtle for my tastes, really.

iMacros for Firefox is still way more powerful than iMacros for Chrome. Same is true for many other "low level" extensions such as Firebug.

I miss Firebug on Chrome.

Could you elaborate? In what ways do you find Chromium's Inspector inferior?

1. Panorama (formerly "Tab Candy"): http://mashable.com/2010/08/25/firefox-4-beta-4-panorama/

2. Firefox Sync, which syncs bookmarks, tabs, passwords, history, and formfill data to all your different computers -- and to Firefox for Android. Firefox Sync encrypts your data client-side for privacy and security, and you can run your own sync server if you want to. (There are multiple open-source server implementations.)

Unlike Chrome's bookmark sync, Firefox Sync encrypts your data client-side for privacy and security

Chrome 10 can encrypt everything client-side too.

Thanks! I didn't know that. Fixed my comment.

Everything that gets synced -- bookmarks, preferences, etc. -- or just passwords? Do you have a source for that? I can only find evidence that passwords are encrypted client-side.

Hmm, good point. According to their documentation, "synced data is encrypted when it travels between your computer and Google’s servers" (this seems to refer to encryption in transit, i.e. SSL) and "As an added layer of protection, your saved passwords are encrypted on your computer and on Google’s servers using a cryptographic key."

http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

That does seem to imply that only passwords are encrypted while in storage. That's not surprising, since Chrome has a "master password" for password encryption, but unlike Firefox it does not require transferring an encryption key for your other sync data. (The client-side encryption key is the reason you need to "pair" your devices to set up Firefox Sync, instead of just entering a username and password.)

You're right, only passwords are encrypted, as evidenced in Google Dashboard.

You can also see your Chrome bookmarks in your Google Docs interface - so not everything gets encrypted.

> Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

Sure! Here are some things I personally find exciting about FF4. I'm not saying everyone should find them exciting, they are just my personal opinion:

* FF4 is the only web browser to combine a tracing JIT with a method JIT for JavaScript. Some websites run amazingly fast with that. See the mozilla demos site for examples.

* IE9 has great hardware acceleration on Windows (but JS engine is inferior to FF4 and Chrome), while Chrome has a great JS engine (but hardware acceleration on Windows is inferior to FF4 and IE9), while FF4 is the only browser to have both great hardware acceleration on Windows + a great JS engine.

* Firefox is the only major browser that is 100% open source. (Chrome isn't open source, it bundles closed-source Flash and a PDF viewer as well as other stuff. Chromium is open source, but the vast majority of Chrome/Chromium users use Chrome.) Firefox is also developed in the open source way, completely in the open, unlike any other browser (including Chromium, where a lot of development is behind closed doors, then 'dropped' into the open - e.g., CrankShaft).

* Almost the same codebase used on desktop and mobile (mobile FF4 will hit RC very soon too). Opera has a mobile version, and Safari and IE have mobile versions too, but they are quite distinct. Firefox brings the mobile and desktop versions closer than those. Among the benefits is you can view desktop versions of websites in FF4 mobile very well. (Of course you generally want mobile versions of websites - but now and then, you do want a desktop version, especially on a tablet.)

Sorry- I'm curious- why do you think IE9's JS engine is inferior to FF4/Chrome?

In my time looking at them IE9 JS engine seems on par with FF4 and Chrome. It's IE9's HTML5/CSS3 support that is behind the other two.

Try any benchmark other than SunSpider.

Word!!!

Mozilla WebM support was developed 'behind closed doors' and 'dropped' into the open on announcement day. You're right that it's not the norm and the developers are generally opposed to that approach though.

Firefox is catching up Chrome's performance. And Chrome is catching up Firefox's features.

I am using firefox 4 beta and its almost as fast as chrome plus some extensions I can't live without are not mature enough in chrome for example pentadactyl + nosquint (hinting doesnt work well with vimium + autozoom), gmail checker (checks multiple gmail accounts), firebug and other development extensions.

You are right, if you are not hooked on some extensions chrome is a good option, my wife is a full time chrome user.

(disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)

Extensions. Firefox has the greatest browser extension ecosystem bar-none. In the past, you had to choose between Chrome's performance, and Firefox 3's extensions.

Certainly Firefox was playing catch-up in performance, but we're there now. Chrome is still far far behind in terms of extensions, and showing no sign of catching up.

Can you elaborate on the differences b/t Chrome and FF extensions a bit? As a Vimperator addict I don't doubt it, but Chrome does seem to have a rapidly expanding extension & app ecosystem.

A lot of Chrome's extensions don't integrate well with the browser itself. They feel a lot like bookmarklets rather than an actual extension of the browser (this is by design). Firefox extensions can be very well integrated. For example, NoScript on Firefox far exceeds the quality any of the alternatives on Chrome.

Simply put, Chrome extensions are HTML/CSS/JS, while Firefox extensions can actually manipulate the interface of the browser to a greater degree (making stuff like Vimperator possible when it wouldn't be possible on Chrome)

Reasons I still use Firefox:

* Password manager with a master password.

* Different Awesome Bar behaviour (which some prefer to Chrome's)

* Delicious extension (the Firefox one blows away the Chrome one)... although that doesn't seem to work in 4.0 yet.

Until Chrome catches up to Firefox in features, I'm excited about a release of Firefox which catches up to Chrome in speed.

> * Password manager with a master password.

Chromium will use your native password manager if possible. For example on KDE it will use KWallet to store passwords.

Firebug. The Webkit inspector is catching up nicely, but for now Firebug is Firefox's 'killer feature' (at least for web devs).

HTML5 Audio. See a definitive rundown why Firefox 4 is the best answer by a wide margin: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audi...

All the Firefox 4 features in one place: https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/p/a/paulro...

Chrome's support for Arabic is crappy on Linux, so I use Firefox.

Another thing, Firefox4 allows you synthesize audio in Javascript, something that Chrome (AFAIK) can't do yet.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

Other things were mentioned already, so not to repeat those:

On Ubuntu in particular (but on other Linux distros, too), Firefox 4 has a more platform-appropriate appearance and feel than the other cross-platform major browsers (Chrome and Opera).

For Web authors, there are more polished HTML5 form features to get excited about. For HTML5 feature involves new elements or attributes in markup, the chances of the features present in Firefox being polished is higher than the chances of the features present in Chrome being polished even though it might casually appear from html5test.com that Chrome support a larger number of these features. html5test.com tests if new APIs appear to be present--not if all the default user interaction works right or if the appearance of a feature is pretty across platforms (not just Mac and Windows but Linux, too).

The location bar history search in Firefox is remarkably more useful than in Chrome, because Firefox matches on more things than just the prefix of the URL (though Chrome has better search coming up and already available in about:flags).

Well, actually, syncing browsing history and passwords across browser instances in such a way that the data in encrypted and decrypted on your devices only is well worth repeating although it was mentioned already. (Syncing history and passwords is immensely more useful than just syncing bookmarks or sending over individual URLs, but history and passwords are the most sensitive browser data, so end-to-end crypto between the user's devices is important.)

(Disclosure: I'm consulting for Mozilla. Disclaimer: Speaking only for myself, though.)

It's not as relevant to the audience here, but more than half of the Web still uses Windows XP and Firefox pays much closer attention to making Firefox look and behave appropriately on XP than Chrome or Opera (and Microsoft just gave XP the finger with IE9)

By far my #1 reason: Tree Style Tabs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Wow...I must say...as someone that abandoned FF for Chrome, FF4 feels SOOO much faster and cleaner than 3.6.

Will definitely continue testing it out.

One thing that FF3.x has had on chrome is total memory footprint. About a month ago, when I was testing FF4, I noticed that the memory usage for FF4 and Chrome were pretty close. I personally think Chrome consumes a bit too much memory for my liking, and I was disappointed to see FF4 following suit. Has anyone noticed if the new RC is more conservative with its memory consumption?

Part of the memory increase was caused by the new JIT. There has indeed been work done recently to bring memory back down. You can see a list of fixed and still-open bugs here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=59846...

For example, this bug significantly reduced memory usage, and was fixed less than a month ago:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631951

However, there are many memory vs. speed trade-offs in software, and as memory continues to get cheaper, you'll likely see all browsers choosing to use more memory in order to run faster.

Keep two things in mind: virtual memory usage is not the same as physical memory usage; an application consuming more memory only matters if you can notice performance degradation elsewhere in your system.

I usually only pay attention to real memory. I also notice when my real memory runs out or real memory, my machine immediately start hitting swap. I guess 4 gigs is just not enough anymore.

This is what I use to measure what I believe to be real memory usage for Chromium: https://gist.github.com/864606

I actually don't think that's accurate, since it naively adds up the resident set size for each Chromium thread. The problem is that there is probably a lot of shared pages among those threads - the Chromium runtime and such. I think - but I'm not sure - that the resident set size includes pages that are shared with other threads/processes.

You may be right. I get the same memory usage numbers with my Chromium memory usage script as Chromium's "Stats for nerds", but Chromium's detailed memory usage tool does link to a bug where it over reports its own memory usage. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25454 I guess if even Google can not figuring out how much memory Chromium is using, laymen, such as myself, are not going to do much better.

At the very least, we can provide bounds. What you and Chromium report is an upperbound. We could provide a lowerbound defined as:

  def thread_low(t): return resident_set(t) - shared_set(t)

  lowerbound = sum(map(thread_low, all_threads)) + min(map(shared_set, all_threads))

(Forgive the Python notation, it would actually be easier to express this using actual summations if I could draw freehand, but given that I can't, I figure code would be clearer.)

For all threads in the process, we know that it must be solely responsible for its resident set minus its shared set. This already is a lower bound, but it ignores what is shared. We can increase (improve) this lowerbound a bit by figuring out what the smallest shared set among all of the threads is. If my thinking is correct, then we can be sure the total memory used won't be lower than this.

Firefox: Chrome

Emacs: Vim

I guess different browsers for different types of people. I still use Firefox on occasion but mostly as a runtime for Firebug. Otherwise, I switched to Chrome more than an year ago and haven't looked back.

My modified version of your analogy:

Firefox: Emacs

Chrom{e,ium}: Vim

That's funny, because one of the main reasons I've stuck to Firefox is its superior Vim emulation support (via Pentadactyl).

And Emacs has viper :)

Well, all the web browsers had Vim emulation, so Emacs was feeling left out ;)

Since beta 10 or 11 FF4 has been really sluggish for me when opening new tabs, and at startup (aka opening lots of 'new' tabs). I don't know what changed, but it's enough to make me consider switching to Chrome. I don't want to, but RC1 is still sluggish to the point of being nearly unusable, given my browsing patterns.

Did you file a bug on this? If not, could you do that please? Since people aren't seeing this in general, your help would presumably be needed to narrow this down....

Actually, I've been thinking about it and the problems happened around the time I upgraded to Windows 7, at which point I installed Firefox to my (relatively old) SSD, which was problematic in the past for Firefox. I'm going to reinstall it to my HDD as I had it previously and see if that fixes the problem.

Sounds good. If the problem persists, please do file a bug!

I'll try it later and edit this comment, but have they changed the way it stores passwords? Currently, without a master password, you can view a user's passwords in plain text.

Ideally, a master password should be a requirement, or passwords should go in the keychain on OSX. Many, many Firefox users do not know about the master password, so if you can sit at their computer you can see their passwords. It's terrifying.

How long after the release candidates do they usually releases the final product? Does anyone know the history of their release periods?

It's been decreasing consistently over the last few releases. If we don't find any major flaws in the RC, we'll ship it as final in a week or two. If we do, you can add a few days to that estimate.

You can find a mostly-complete release history at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases

Mike Beltzner just said on reddit that the final should be released in a "couple of weeks". But the RC is pretty much the final. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g197r/iama_were_on_the...

I admire Firefox for what it's accomplished, but Chrome has stolen my heart. I had to use Firefox today actually to test something, and discovered a Bing bar that I'm pretty sure I didn't consent to, taking up valuable real-estate.

Whatever that bar is, it's not Mozilla official. Some other software on your computer put it there.

That very well may be, but my point was basically that it's not something I have to worry about in Chrome either.

You will, once the toolbar/adware/malware makers start targeting Chrome more. (Google can try to stop them, but it will be an arms race.)

It doesn't have bars really, only buttons that open floating views. Although I suppose you could inject a bar into the web page.

Some other software on your computer put it there.

Why does Firefox allow this?

It's not a question of Firefox allowing this -- if you run any program on your computer it'll have access to your data (and hence to your Firefox profile), and one of the principles behind Firefox is extensibility.

Chrome has taken the same approach Firefox did:

We can't prevent this from happening so we try to provide a good way for other software to do it, so they don't do it in terrible ways:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/external_extensions...

It's an addon

There is work to give the user more control over this that unfortunately didn't make it into Firefox 4 [1], but ultimately it's a battle that can't be won; on the desktop, apps can modify other apps. I suspect that this will happen to Chrome too.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596343

Heck, since Chrome has to put itself into the users AppData folder in order to do silent updates, is there anything preventing malware from just screwing with the Chrome libraries themselves?

Technically, your operating system's security model allows this. There's little Firefox could do to prevent it.

This is a historical accident; only toy and mobile OSes have any sort of application-level access control.

>> There's little Firefox could do to prevent it.

Wrong, they can just add DRM.

Even though you can't uninstall it, you can disable the extension on a per-user basis. Firefox looks in both per-user and system-wide locations to find installed addons. Only per-user addons can be removed by the user, in the addons dialog. System-wide extensions can be disabled per-user, but not uninstalled (disabling is almost the same thing). To uninstall a system-wide extension, hopfully the publisher has an unistall script, but worst-case, you can just delete the extension folder from the system-wide location. e.g. C:\Users\All Users\Mozilla\something on Windows.

I switched to chrome after trying to use Minefield for about a month. Minefield was ugly - I just couldn't get it to look perfect. Chrome has all the extensions I need now. Firefox doesn't have anything special in my opinion. Chrome is faster and light weight. I just wish it had a tab preview like Firefox's "Tab Scope" and a proper title in the titlebar.

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