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Firefox 4 is here

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670 pointspotomak345 comments

I started using Firefox again the day I heard about the 4.0 Release Candidate, and thought I could give it a another try after it failed to convince me the few times I tried to use it in the past.

I was pleasently surprised. The browser's way faster; launching it doesn't take that much time; the UI is way more responsive; and all the add-ons I've been using in the past are compatible with 4.0 (Web Developer, Firebug, Colorzilla, etc.).

I'm currently using it as my primary browser again, and it looks like it will stay on that podest for awhile.

It's awesome to see a browser resurecting with that many improvements, despite the fact that some people have almost written it off due to some annoying issues in past versions, the most prominent one being performance.

I'd really recommend you to give it a try.

Disclaimer: I've been using Opera 11 as my primary browser before I decided to give FF 4.0 a try

>Disclaimer: I've been using Opera 11 as my primary browser before I decided to give FF 4.0 a try

The top menu left button in FF now looks exactly like Opera's menu button. Of course, now all browsers look basically the same with almost all UI chrome gone.

Actually it looks quite like Opera in a lot of ways. Even the shading on the buttons on the toolbar. (Windows only, in Linux looks dramatically different.)

Why is title bar there? I was hoping they'd push the tabs up into the title bar like Chrome and give us more screen space.

On my little netbook this is a deal-breaker. It wastes about 1/10 of the screen.

I assume you mean you'd rather the title bar wasn't there - for your net book. Which is a fair comment.

I guess you could run the browser in full screen mode. Though full screen doesn't suit everyone.

Maximize. It puts the tabs in the title bar when you maximize.

this should be shipped on be default.

edit: "this" appears to be as yet undefined. Unless ... can someone point me to whatever "maximize" is?

edit: FF4 does not behave as you describe on my WinXP box at work.

Press the little button in the titlebar that makes any window fill the screen.

Note that tabs will appear in the titlebar when maximized on Windows only, for Firefox 4, and only if you have the menu bar hidden. (It's hidden by default in Windows Vista and 7.) Tabs in the titlebar are planned for Mac and Linux too, but weren't ready for this release.

For whatever reason, the voters seem to think I didn't try that before commenting. FF4 does not behave as described on my WinXP box at work.

they probably don't have xp anymore. works fine on 7.

Hm, don't know what to say. Perhaps disable the menu bar. That did it for me.

Here's what firefox 4 looks like running on windows XP: http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/460/20110322144851800x600...

Where is this "maximize"? Is it an add-on? A button I'm not seeing?

edit: why the downvotes? I'm at work on my rickety WinXP corporate box, and FF4 definitely does not behave as described above. (Do really think I didn't try that?!)

Maximize as in what your OS allows you to do.

edit: Oh, Windows XP. You'll have to disable the menu bar to get it to work there, I think.

check. That works, thanks!

F11

To make it easier to grab the window and move it. You can maximize the window, and since you can't move it anymore once it's maximized, the tabs will move to the right of the Firefox button.

This doesn't work on Linux, due to window manager issues. Perhaps Firefox can do something like Chrome does as a workaround, although Chrome's workaround is awfully heavyweight (it basically reimplements all the functions of the WM).

I like having a title bar, I park collapsed Trillian chat windows up there and I HATE that Chrome doesn't give me space to do that. It's a UI deal breaker for Chrome for me.

It's indeed odd.

The 'title' is the meta element, that is incredibly useful! It deserves attention. Not to be lost.

That's not to say tat I don't like slim tool bars.

I also prefer uniformity across the desktop and this feels like a deviation. Much in the way that a tabbing interface was alien when opera introduced it.

I like tabs, but I'd rather my window manager work with them. But that's just me.

I'm running minefield, and I've noticed some issues in Gmail, with dragging selected text - I think the browser assumes I'm dragging and dropping. Firefox still doesn't squeeze the tab size to fit the window width, which irritates the hell out of me.

Having said that there doesn't seem to be a radical UI overhaul - which is a shame.

Not sure if they work on FF4 (yet), but there are add-ons for that, of course.

I don't mind losing the title bar, since I've long been in the habit of alt+dragging to move windows anyway.

(This is a linux-ism, but well worth installing 3rd party software on OSX/Windows for -- particularly for alt + middle/right-button resizing: no need to screw around landing your mouse on a corner of the window.)

View->Toolbars->Menu Bar

That gives you an Opera-style widget on the left side for menu functions and moves tabs to the top.

edit: And Alt will bring the normal menu into view if you need something not on the widget.

Maximize the window AND disable the menu bar. If you don't disable the menu bar, you don't see the Firefox menu or the tabs in the title bar space.

Disclaimer: I am a Firefox Fanboi

At work I can only use Firefox or IE so no brainer there - I use Firefox. At home I use Firefox but generally have Chrome open to play the odd Facebook game. The thing that puzzles me is I really don't notice any difference in performance between Chrome and Firefox and never have. I have a 4mb internet connection at the moment but noticed nothing different when I had 8.

The only reason I use Chrome is to play around with any HTML5 stuff and simple curiosity. With Firefox's huge add on libraries, Firebug, Tab controls etc I honestly cannot see why so much fuss is made about Chrome!

If flash crashes, it only crashes out one tab. That's the killer feature for me with chrome.

Firefox has had plugin isolation for Flash since 3.6.4 on Windows, and Firefox 4 brings that to all platforms.

In firefox, if flash crashes, it doesn't crash any tab; just the flash element (e.g. the youtube video box becomes gray)

I noticed that and it was a very welcome addition.

The only problem is I don't remember Flash or FF crashing before, except some rare occasion. Now I see Flash crashes somewhat often.

Do you maybe have a Flash blocker installed? Flash is responsible for 100% of my browser crashes.

It's the same for Chrome.

> just the flash element (e.g. the youtube video box becomes gray)

In every tab, all flash elements become gray. I'd rather just one tab crash that parts of many tabs crashing.

The same thing happens in Chrome as in Firefox. Whenever the Flash plugin crashes for me in Chrome all Flash elements in every tag crash.

Note: Firefox used to crash the entire browser when Flash crashed so the method that Chrome and Firefox now use is an improvement.

Ah, so it's just Flash that sucks then. I'm a firefox user myself, just can't stand how Chrome looks or losing all the plugins I'm accustomed to in firefox. I just really like the idea of one process per tab for managing memory and safety.

I was a FF user until I found out Chrome was much faster with the webkit, but I'll always give Firefox a shot again if they manage to beat Chrome's speed.

Is that something new? When flash shockwave crashes (on Windows 7 at least) it takes down all instances of flash in Chrome (for me anyway). Please tell me I'm wrong or that this has changed.

For me it was the speed of Chrome that made me switch. On Windows, Chrome opens faster than notepad. It's literally the fastest starting app I have.

Firefox is quite the opposite.

The difference was enough for me to forgo the whole list of extensions that I used in Firefox (this was before Chrome even had extensions)

I switched about a couple of years ago - maybe things have improved since.

Disclaimer: FF user turned chromite

I enjoy the speed and simplicity of chrome. For development work, I actually prefer the webkit DOM inspector to firebug. I was never a heavy plugin user to begin with, so firefox never tempted me much there. I think that if you're not planning on using plugins, the core browser features of chrome are more polished (again, this is just my opinion). If you're a heavy plugin user though, ff or opera is the way to go.

  > The browser's way faster;

That's awesome. Maybe I can go back to using firefox instead of chrome.

The beta 4 was almost faster than chrome in fact.

Seems like all my previous addons that were used to improve firefox UI have been incorporated into 4.0. Very glad that Vimperator works, the main reason I use firefox. I wouldn't have upgraded if it did not.

You might want to look into https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/ . The description says it's "the next generation of Vimperator by its primary developers". Sounds like Vimperator will stop working sometime soon.

Ive been looking into the addons and both of them have the same update date, whats the difference? they look the same to me (I havent installed both of them since vimperator works well :P )

What did you prefer from FF that wasn't in Opera?

To everybody asking what Firefox has that Chrome lacks: The Awesomebar.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but it's by far the thing I miss the most from FF (along with FireBug and TreeStyle Tabs). It practically replaces bookmarks for me because because it searches through the history. In Chrome it feels like I have to re-google everything unless I remember the exact url.

Personally, I like Chrome's address bar better than Firefox 4's. In Chrome, I can type g-m-<enter> to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m-<down>-<enter>. It's a little thing, but it makes a difference to me.

Can't live without Tree Style Tabs though. Firefox is my "heavy lifting" browser.

I greatly prefer being able to hit enter on the first result too. Here is the addon I use to enable that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-...

You don't need an addon -- the option is in about:config.

Specifically, browser.urlbar.autoFill. (Found that out just now.)

You can use tab instead of the down arrow - pretty much identical to tab completion in the linux command line.

You can change FF's behavior to match Chrome: setting browser.urlbar.autoFill to true in about:config will enable inline autocomplete in the awesomebar, instead of having to arrow down or tab down.

The solution I use is bookmarking sites and aliasing keywords to the bookmark - right click on a bookmark, go to properties, and add a keyword. For example, I have "hn" as the keyword for the Hacker News homepage, so if I type "hn" and hit enter, it expands to the full URL and goes to the page.

> In Chrome, I can type g-m-<enter> to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m-<down>-<enter>. It's a little thing, but it makes a difference to me.

This is really easy to do in Firefox with keyword bookmarks[0]. In fact, this is one of the things I hate about Chrome - keyword bookmarks are a total hack (you have to create a search engine without the %s, for string substitution).

0: http://lifehacker.com/#!196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-a...

Yeah. In chrome I can type just the domain (without the www. part). But FF (even with the urlbar.autofill property set requires me to type with www.

And in chrome I can do ctrl+shift+pageup/pagedown to move the tabs around. FF doesn't allow that.

Minor irritant, but thats what makes me like chrome.

This is a good point that I've only noticed recently. Address bar completion in Chrome is much much worse than in Firefox.

Yeah, I really miss Firefox URL keyword search. Too bad it becomes very slow as your history grows (at least in the older versions of FF).

That's definitely an issue, but there's a workaround if you want to do it. You need to VACUUM the sqlite database like this: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-...

Firefox actually vacuums occasionally now (I think ~1/month for the places database)

Running 3.latest forever, I keep 4 months and it's as snappy as anything for what I use it for. I can get to the top 5 of my visited sites ordered by number of visits for each letter of the alphabet in one or two characters. While the history sidebar is exceedingly slow in doing searches, the address bar MRU is what they have nailed.

I have been using Chrome for 6 months now.

What I liked about Chrome: optimized usage of vertical space and speed. But what I really disliked about it -- Chrome add-ons are useless. Chrome would never allow something like Firebug without being built-in. And I couldn't find a plugin with proper Delicious integration either.

Also, searching the history in the address bar works a lot better in Firefox -- probably has something to do with the way Chrome encourages you to use Google. And speaking of History -- Chrome still doesn't let you search and delete items in the search results page. What's up with that?

Now Firefox 4 has it all -- the interface is still not as vertical-space efficient as in Chrome, but as I understand it on Windows tabs do move in the title bar, and that little change is coming for Linux too.

I love Firefox 4. They did an awesome job.

Why do you say that Firefox 4 is not as vertical-space efficient as Chrome?

Right click on your tabs, and select 'Tabs on top'. Right click on the Menu bar and uncheck 'Menu bar'. Done--looks like Chrome!

I'm on Linux and I can't find the "tabs on top" option.

EDIT: oh, found it, but my tabs were already on top.

Problem is, Chrome also does away with the title bar.

No, it doesn't look like Chrome. There's still a title bar that Chrome hides in the maximized mode.

It works without problems on WinXP, there is no difference; throughout the beta-versions Firefox incrementally used some minor tweaks of Chrome (for instance, where the link-bar on mouse-hover or the status-information on loading the web-page was displayed). Sad to hear that it does not work on all OSs -- for me it is one of the most important improvements.

I couldn't find a plugin with proper Delicious integration

The Delicious addon doesn't seem to have been marked as working with Firefox 4, so it won't install. Have you tried the about:config hack to ignore the plugin compatibility check? Does the Delicious addon work if so?

> Also, searching the history in the address bar works a lot better in Firefox -- probably has something to do with the way Chrome encourages you to use Google. And speaking of History -- Chrome still doesn't let you search and delete items in the search results page. What's up with that?

This is my biggest complaint about Chrome and am very happy to see Firefox 4 being released and still kicking ass in that department. The Firefox address bar almost makes bookmarks obsolete.

I've been on the FF4 beta for some time (the web app we work on is currently only supported on firefox). My honest assessment? FF4 is a huge improvement over FF3, specifically in terms of performance. It's still not Chrome though. Firebug works great in it (better than it does in FF3).

So yeah, if you've been using FF3 for web-dev or to browse, you're about to get a major upgrade. If you're a Chrome user I don't know of anything that would make FF4 especially attractive.

I don't know about you, but using Chrome has always given me this unsettling feeling that somewhere in Google's server farm, a machine is collecting everything I do and linking it to my other activity (gmail, gdocs, etc). It might now actually be going on, but it's hard for me to trust that it's not. I just don't like giving a behemoth like Google access to my complete internet history, even though the most harmful thing it could collect on me is how many HN tabs I have open during the work day.

I'm pretty sure that's the case :D

Chrome's location bar provides everything you _type_ to Google, and using its sync feature gives them all of your bookmarks and history.

> Chrome's location bar provides everything you _type_ to Google

That can be changed on about:flags

> sync feature gives them all of your bookmarks and history.

Unless you don't use Gmail and do all your websearch using Incognito, I don't see that as a problem.

You can just turn off suggestions in the preferences. I don't think you need to go to the about: settings.

Isn't that what Chromium is for?

> It might now actually be going on, but it's hard for me to trust that it's not.

Run Chromium. It's fully open source. You can see for yourself that nothing scary is being sent to Google. The same can't be said for Chrome since the source is closed, but there's basically zero difference between the two. The icon is a bit less colorful I guess.

Has anyone actually done any research into exactly what data is sent to Google when you use Chrome?

Not that it really matters anymore, FF4 is faster than Chrome in my experiments so don't think I'll be using Chrome at all anymore.

You want to talk to the SRWare Iron team.

Why would you trust the "SRWare Iron team", whoever they are, at all?

And why would you trust them more than you would trust Google?

I didn't say anything about trust.

It was merely a suggestion to look at Iron or talk to the developers as they promote their product as an alternative to Chrome along the lines of privacy. You'd think they'd be in a good position to point out the differences.

Do you?

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

At a glance, it doesn't seem like much has changed. Some more tweaks and a minor amount of development.

Thanks for the link.

> but there's basically zero difference between the two

Chrome sports integrated Flash, integrated PDF, and more codec support (though it recently dropped H264 entirely)

You can take the Chrome Flash and PDF plugins and use them with Chromium.

I love giving everything I do to Google. It makes my daily life so much easier. Whenever I think about big corps and how I potentially may not trust them, I look around for people who actually work there. In Google's case, I find young, smart, cool people just like me who I trust not to be dicks and do things with my stuff I wouldn't want them to. They may mess up sometimes (I would), but I feel like I can trust them. The upsides from sharing all of this stuff with Google outweight the possible downsides for me.

Just wanted to post this since I feel like not enough people speak up to represent the not-so-paranoid crowd.

In Google's case, I find young, smart, cool people just like me who I trust not to be dicks

What is this? has any thought gone behind this?

I'm not your peer: I'm stupid, uncool and very, VERY old. That's why I decided to teach you fuckers a lesson and put on my fake cop uniform. With a few fake emails & and a phone call, I convinced Bobby, the head of security at data center #34 in Dallas to give me your life's records. Yours along with 5 million other people.

I was talking specifically about trusting Google's motivations, not the concept of security itself. You're twisting the issue; of course it's possible that Google's security will be broken somehow. But that's the case with anything, anywhere, anytime. So there's not much point (IMO) in basing decisions around that possibility.

"Motivation" means jack-squat in world where powerful entities can buy, steal, or subpoena Google's stash of your personal data. And it's no longer just your data, but involves your entire social-graph. Say, you write to your sister about your father's health in great detail, because you chose to "share" your data with Google, now you're sharing his health information as well, and whoever steals or buys this information (remember, Google is a commercial entity) has it.

The likelihood of someone going to great lengths to break through Google's security is rather higher than someone going to great lengths to break into your personal computer (assuming you are at least capable of securing that against generic threats, which really isn't that hard for technical folks).

It's the agglomeration of lots of people's data that gets dangerous/interesting. And seemingly boring data like your browsing history can actually be pretty revealing -- ah, hey, I notice you regularly sign into the Bank of America site, plus you have an account on the forums at (easily hackable site)... might your username and/or password be the same? Ah, you sign in as the admin on an "anonymous" blog... and you mention your first pet (common security question) and link to your favorite uncle's blog, but he has a different last name from you... so is that your mother's maiden name? You see how this works.

If some clever had access to this level of data on lots and lots of people, they wouldn't strike gold for everyone, but there would be quite a few casualties.

All this to say that there are some very good reasons to avoid letting corporations gather lots of wide-ranging data about you in one place. The intentions of the corporation don't actually matter as much (though obviously if they're selling your data, the risks are higher); it's how valuable that data stockpile is, and to whom.

If you just have your own data, and you manage it yourself, it's not worth it for someone to put much effort into hacking you personally, so you're in a much safer position.

> In Google's case, I find young, smart, cool people just like me who I trust not to be dicks and do things with my stuff I wouldn't want them to.

Not too long ago, "Google fires employee for snooping on users" - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl...

One in thousands. Like I said: people make mistakes. It doesn't bother me that we're dealing with human beings who aren't perfect; better this than the big brother corporation with an agenda.

> One in thousands.

What if that one person is one who thinks "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"[1], and who just happens to be the CEO of the company? Would you still trust the company totally?

What the head honcho of the company says _is_ its agenda.

I love Google for the cool things they have done and continue to do. But it does get scary to think how big they have become.

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48975

Yes, because I actually agree with his statement. I have nothing to hide; Google can know all about it if it makes my life easier.

Lets say I'm a chrome user (and loving it), is Firefox4 worth a try? What are the main differences from the last version?

The Tab Candy (http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/tabcandy/) feature is pretty cool.

The big thing about Firefox is the Addons: FireBug, NoScript, Adblock Plus, and Pentadactyl (was known as Vimperator) all add up to a fantastic experience.

With Firefox 4 I get the fantastic experience with something much closer to Chrome's speed and tab usability. I don't know if I would say Firefox 4 is quite there yet but it is much much closer.

I'm curious; in what way do you prefer Chrome's tab handling?

For me it's one of the worst things about Chrome; this window currently has ten tabs open and that's at the _very_ low end for me. With Firefox I can see what I've got open no matter how many I've got because of the pop-down list and the scrolling bar, while Chrome just mashes the list into invisibility.

Also - Tree Style Tab [1] is a must have for me (on 3.x for now, just checking if I'll upgrade now or wait for some of my plugins to migrate first)

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

I just plugged this in another reply. The latest and greatest can be found at the author's site.

btw... TabCandy is now called Panorama.

Yes, I'm using Tree Style Tabs on FF4 now, it's fantastic once you go over 20 or so tabs.

Do you have no issues with it on 4? Mine is very buggy, won't open child (or any other) tabs properly, they open non-visible.

Give Vertical Tabs a shot. It's faster, albeit no tree handling.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

Here here. Chrome's tab handling is a nightmare. I hope FF4 will give me a reason to switch back and get access to what should be simple things (vertical tab lists) but appear to be difficult to provide in Chrome.

For a fast and simple vertical tabs implementation, see https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/

The big thing is just the smoothness of handling tabs. Closing a group of tabs in Chrome is a pleasure because of how it moves the tabs when you close one. Also grabbing a tab and moving it into a new window is a very clean/smooth operation.

Firefox has improved a lot. 4 is a fantastic piece of software but it isn't quite as polished as Chrome is.

Despite these issues I greatly prefer Firefox over Chrome. Chrome might be more polished but Firefox is (imho) a much more powerful piece of software and at the end of the day I care much more for power than polish.

I use Multiple Tab Handler. Closing a group of tabs in FF is a simple as selecting them (click, shift+click) and closing them. This is an example of why I love Firefox - it is way more permissive with what extensions can do.

Maybe it's only me but TabCandy/Panorama feels slow and clumsy, and there's too much mouse clicking/moving involved in operating it (or so it seems after 5 minute of trying it, maybe a matter of getting used to/discovering keyboard shortcuts). I like Opera's solution more (is less revolutionary, and thus easier to adapt to probably). But other than that first impressions are good: feels faster and more responsive (at last!). Maybe I will give it some more tries to see if it will survive a stress test of a normal day-to-day use with tons of tabs opened, etc.

Pentadactyl is not the new name for Vimperator, it's the name of a fork of Vimperator. Both projects still exist and are both still being actively developed.

In my experience, at least as of last Friday, you have to use a nightly to get a working version of Pentadactyl, while the version of Vimperator up on the Mozilla add-ons site is fine. I'm personally using Vimperator, just b/c I haven't yet had an itch that it doesn't scratch, and I'm not really clear on what Pentadactyl actually does better (because I'm too lazy to figure it out myself and haven't been able to find a current bullet-pointed list that tells me).

Worth a try? Yes.

Better Tab handling and has the ability to hold tabs in "groups" and a "panorama" view which allows you to view all tabs across groups.

The awesome bar has also improved significantly and has some smart features (like the option of tab switching instead of opening a new tab when you already have a URL open).

Better Add-ons management interface and some add-ons work without a restart of the browser.

Websockets disabled (for security)

I still prefer Chrome though.

PS. I've been using the FF 4 beta version for a 3-4 months now and probably dont remember the other significant changes.

I've been using FF4 beta since B3... does anyone actually use the panorama/tab grouping thing? I find its performance really poor and kinda frustrating, especially since I've been using add-ons that provide similar functionality for a while.

It is invaluable when I'm doing research or development and I want to "swap out" something that I'm working on to focus on something else. Since that takes up the vast majority of my time -- yeah, I use it a lot.

I do - kind of. Since I don't have Firefox set to reopen the last batch of tabs I had opened the last time I was using it, Panorama is kind of useless in my case, since I would mainly use it to keep tabs grouped by content, and it would be a chore to redo the grouping at each restart. Still, it comes in handy to keep reddit/hn on one group and work related stuff on another groups and quickly switch between the two by doing Ctrl - Shift - ~. A big optimization was to set browser.panorama.animate_zoom to false in about:config. That animation was killing the flow in my case.

Session restore saves your tab groups.

Mmh yeah, I should have specified that I specifically set ff up to not restore tabs on startup!

Since I tend to have 20-30 tabs open at a time, the tabs are usually too small to read - so I ended up using the Panorama to hold "ReadItLater" tabs. But now that the TreeStyleTab add-on is compatible with FF4, I no longer use it. Btw.. if you have a widescreen monitor, check out TreeStyle tab.

TreeStyleTab changed the way I browse completely. I wouldn't be able to live without it now.

I find Vertical Tabs to be much faster; I didn't actually use the tree feature!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

>TreeStyleTab add-on is compatible with FF4, I no longer use it

Does it work with your FF4? Mine doesn't!!!

The author's site has the latest version that works with FF4. http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

DL: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?treestyletab.xp...

I'm running version: 2011031901

This link: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?treestyletab.xp...

gives me: Forbidden Installation You don't have a permission to install XPI package directly from other websites. You have to access this extension from the home page of itself.

Am I doing something wrong?

What you have appears to be the latest version (similar to what I have). Weird that I didn’t see that warning though. Which OS are you on? (I am on a mac)

I'm on Windows 7 - 64

I imagine it will get worked out, but its not until something fails that you realize your dependence.

I use it incredibly heavily, in the same way that I use virtual desktops. I have a tab group for work, a tab group for play, a tab group for documentation. Makes it very easy to quickly jump in and out of large collections of tabs without having a completely unusable tab bar like Chrome does.

I use FreshStart (an extension) for that in Chrome.

Only by accident. It stole a longstanding adblock extension keybinding, and I haven't yet retrained my fingers.

The performance is great here on Arch Linux x64, haven't noticed any hiccups with it. I use the grouping feature to separate out tasks -- I have a work group, a research group, and a misc. group at the moment. It keeps my tab bar cleaner and more relevant and stops me from getting distracted as a flip through tabs when doing work or something. I have gmail pinned as an app tab, so that tab appears on all groups.

Different (Chrome-inspired) UI; faster (rendering speed) compared to previous versions and some techy-things like hardware acceleration. They also have synchronisation built-in now.

I'm also a Chrome user but I'd quite like to switch back if they've sorted out the chronic lag issues I've always had.

Update: In ff4 now, looks and feels great, if a little sluggish with page scrolling. I don't know, Chrome just feels slicker.

Update 2: Just froze up loading a flash game, shame.

I have been using chrome on a Mac and it felt so sluggish that I looked at ff4 betas to improve it. The ff betas feel much more responsive and the rc was even more so. It might have something to do with my mbp having trouble with the high res external monitor but anecdotally that's what I have seen.

It's not my main browser but I don't seem to have issues with Chrome on OSX, I'd suggest maybe purging your install (or at least it seems you're experiencing something unusual).

It was working ok until I got a 30" monitor. Then it became a choppy scroll and sluggish. Sluggish I can handle more than the scrolling.

Are you on OS X Leopard?

My understanding is that the out-of-process rendering used by Chrome forces blitting the whole page from the child process to the parent chrome on systems predating Snow Leopard.

Nope snow leopard with the latest patches applied.

Different (Chrome-inspired) UI

I would say it is a carbon-copy of Opera, but that's just me: http://imgur.com/IzVxJ

I was surprised also that the UI is so similar to Opera. I always wanted to go from Opera to Firefox (because Opera's lack of Adblock and some problems with google apps like calendar, gmail), but it was too slow and ugly. Now I give it a good test.

If anything it's the other way around. Mozilla works out in the open and the designs of the new UI had been released long before Opera released its software, as Alex Limi points out: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-4/. That said, what's wrong with taking the good ideas from other products? It's a net win for the users and the web.

Wow, that's strikingly similar, I had no idea (I don't use Opera).

If you're using OS X and have kinetic scrolling ("scroll with momentum") enables at the OS level, you can try disabling "Smooth Scrolling" in FF4 (Advanced -> General -> Use Smooth Scrolling).

The startup time of Chrome is hard to beat - I'll stick with Chrome for now.

Just how often do you start your browser?

chuckle This is the exact same thread I used to see years ago, except it was the startup time of vi vs. emacs. Being an emacs guy, I would generally remark something like, "yeah, I remember the ONE time a few months ago I started emacs when the sparc had to be rebooted for new memory."

There is no startup time in Chrome, it is always running even if you close it.

According to LifeHacker, Firefox 4 is on par with Chrome.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5784396/browser-speed-tests-firefox-...

If startup speed is your main criteria, you want Opera.

* Faster startup, more responsive, faster JavaScript with the new Jaegermonkey JIT.

* New, less cluttered UI.

* Built-in sync of bookmarks/tabs/history/passwords, fully encrypted on the client (unlike Chrome's sync which encrypts passwords only).

* Sync your bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and form data to Firefox for Android!

See also this thread for answers from various members of the Firefox team: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g197r/iama_were_on_the...

Maybe it's just me but every FF UI I've seen looks slightly clunky and this one while better is still the ugliest of the next generation browsers (though Safari gives it a run for it's money).

And the menu the Firefox button in the top left brings up is simply horrible.

It's like someone said "I like the fact that the Windows Start button looks and acts differently to every other menu or dialog anywhere, but wouldn't it be good if it looked a bit more like a menu to make it more confusing and was generally a bit uglier and more amateurish".

But aren't those all features of Chrome? Wouldn't a happy Chrome user want to know about something FF4 does that Chrome doesn't?

It's very clear that 4 > 3.6, the features you listed are awesome ... they just aren't very appealing to a current Chrome user.

The primary reason to use FF is that you like a particular addon, you like FF's expose over Chrome's, or you like how FF does the location bar (which is why I use FF). There's not a ton of differentiation between the two any more.

I was answering the question from above "what are the differences from the current version?"

As for the differences from Chrome, those are mostly the same as they've always been: Deeper extensibility, more customization points, and made by a non-profit organization dedicated to openness.

Most customization points is the big win for me. I REALLY like to alter my browsers to fit my preferred layout and FF has done quite well at maintaining that capability for me. I get into Chrome and I find myself constantly going "Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... " to the point I close it in frustration yet again.

Absolutely. You would never be able to do something like http://conkeror.org in Chrome. At one point I tried to change some key bindings in Chrome, and I had to spend 2 hours recompiling the whole thing; it was an absolute nightmare.

In fairness, isn't Conkeror more of a fork of Firefox than an extension (though I believe it started as an extension)?

Not quite. Mozilla is a platform with which you can build apps. Firefox is by far the most popular app running on the Mozilla platform, but there are many others, including SongBird, Thunderbird, etc. The bare executable for the Mozilla platform is Xulrunner, and that's what Conkeror uses.

Anyway, the one thing that keeps Firefox competitive is that they built a platform in a fast yet very awkward language, then they built an application on top of that using a much more pleasant, flexible language. None of the other browser vendors understand this; Chrome devs parrot the "but Javascript is too slow to build our UI in" even though they have the fastest JS engine in the world. It boggles the mind and cripples them in the long term for anything other than your standard point-n-grunt interfaces.

Exactly my experience so far, except there's _still_ no decent Firefox replacement for Chrome's Google Quick Scroll. I forget I even use that extension in Chrome until I end up constantly Ctrl + F'ing the hell out of search results pages in Firefox.

You know what this really makes me? A huge fan of lastpass/xmarks (and 1password, but that's because neither lastpass nor 1password has successfully covered everything I want from a password manager, but they seem to complement each other well enough in my use case).

Multi-row tabs. It's not built into FF, but it is available with an add-on. After using multi-row tabs for a while, I can't live without them.

What Firefox has:

1) the Awesomebar, which I love, although some people hate, plus more advanced functionality -- like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

It also seems pretty clear that Chrome is built to use the Google Search Engine whenever possible. For example if you search for something in the location bar, Firefox can redirect you to the very first result on Google for that search if it has a high degree of certainty. The Awesomebar is also designed such that you'll do less searching on Google.

However, the ties of Chrome to Google can be seen by the way the browser makes you search on Google, even in cases where a local search in your history would make much more sense.

2) Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless. I.e. Firebug can be a Firefox plugin, while on Chrome this had to be baked in. It means Firefox can have things like proper ad-blocking and Delicious integration on the push of a button

3) a non-profit organization behind it -- when dealing with companies and organizations the concept of "trust" applies heavily, and personally I trust that Mozilla looks after my interests much more than I trust Google

> like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History.

> Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless.

It's worth noting that Firefox is working on adding Chrome-like 'useless' extensions to their browser.

https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/index.html

> a non-profit organization behind it

Sure, but remember that they don't run on rainbows and dreams. Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate payments.

I do agree about AwesomeBar (miss it) and extension support (though I don't miss any from FF, myself) though.

    Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History

No you CANNOT.

     Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate 
     payments

That doesn't say much or anything at all. Mozilla wasn't founded by Google and could always find other sources of revenue.

Also, Mozilla isn't a public company with shareholders, it's also not a company masked as a non-profit to evade taxes, which means Mozilla's interest isn't profit, just survival. It's a totally different ball game.

EDIT: also about Jetpack, Chrome-like plugins have been available for Firefox for quite some time, you just need to install a plugin -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

> No you CANNOT.

Well, with elaborate replies like that ... I'm not sure whether I should bother, but: http://i.imgur.com/rxFgd.png

> Greasemonkey

Chrome plugins can do a lot more than Greasemonkey. Why do you think Jetpack exists?

    Well, with elaborate replies like that ...

Perhaps you should bother reading what I wrote first, instead of doing screenshots to prove me wrong?

Take a look at the phrase you yourself quoted ...

    you can't search your history and delete items 
    in the search results

Do I really need to elaborate more on it?

I can,

1) Search my history 2) Delete items in the search results

As shown in that screenshot.

EDIT: Since I can't reply to him (yet?), thank you mbrubeck for replying and explaining the comment instead of just typing "YOU CANNOT."

Once you do a search, the option to remove items disappears. You can delete items or you can search, but you cannot delete items in the search results.

Dude, I know natural language can be ambiguous, but I left no room for ambiguity.

So to summarize -- (1) misread what I said, (2) assumed I'm an idiot who can't find Chrome's History panel and (3) replied with "works on my machine" just to prove me wrong.

If you like Chrome, great, personally I love both browsers; but the issue here is that you should stay as far away as possible from real customers.

Does it finally store passwords in Keychain?

No, sadly, it does not, and the Keychain Integration add-on isn't compatible with FF 4 yet.

Since Fx3, there is that add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/keychain-serv...

The simple answer is no. But the more complicated answer (as a Firefox developer looked into doing this a while ago), is that Keychain is pretty limiting about what you can (easily) store. Our heuristics require that we store more information about logins (for example, the action url). It also restricts protocols, so we can't store password for chrome:// urls there.

Not to say it's never a possibility, but it's not just because we don't want to!

* Real ad blocking (more generally: real extensions).

Other points (not so major for most):

* Audio api (allows you to synthesize audio)

* Better language support (Chrome on Linux has tons of issues with non-latin languages)

I find that Chrome's extensions are quite real, feature rich, and stable. The last time I used FF, massive memory leaks were blamed on "your extensions." Not to mention I'm not even sure which IETab extension is real anymore. One is dead, the new one is nagware, etc.

Oh, and I like that flash is sandboxed and autoupdated. I like a built-in PDF reader. I can't imagine going back to the stone age of browsers with FF or IE and downloading all the various readers and plugins for a basic web experience (Adobe reader, flash, etc).

I'm sure FF4 is good by Firefox standards, but Google is doing something very new with Chrome. The out of the box experience is stellar and end users are secure because they really have no idea how to update flash or adobe reader on their own.

Well, AdBlocking in chrome is really weak.

Also, I actually don't like the built-in PDF reader in Chrome. Scrolling was weird in it last time I checked.

Yeah, personally, I'd rather stick with evince, and have the same PDF viewer whether I open a document from the browser or from the command line.

I find that Chrome's extensions are quite real, feature rich, and stable.

For a lot of basic stuff, yes. GMail checker, Adblocking (afaik), simple stuff that just requires the equivalent of a Greasemonkey userscript or a button.

However, for deeper stuff that really changes the UI of the browser, Chrome is no where near Firefox. Take a look at TreeStyleTab, DownThemAll, Pentadactyl, and similar feature rich extensions. Those simply cannot be done in Chrome as is. There are some weak alternatives, but they don't do half of what Firefox's do. Vimium has issues with focus and nothing like Pentadactyl's customization; Vertical tabs doesn't allow proper grouping, UI, or options; I don't think DownThemAll's separate window is even possible on Chrome but I could be wrong.

This isn't to score points for Firefox; it's a serious weakness in Chrome that's the main thing that's kept me from switching. I don't know if Google intends to allow this kind of extensibility, but damn I hope they do.

    Oh, and I like that flash is sandboxed and autoupdated.

I was a huge critic of it initially but the auto-update is now what seems to be locking me into recommending Chrome to all my non-technical friends and relatives. When I think "which browser shall I give to my mother that will give her a good experience and keep her safe at the same time?" - knowing that she's getting auto updated and that the updates are coming frequently is just hugely reassuring. With Flash auto updated, PDFs out of the picture due to native rendering, Google's proactive stance (offering bounties and an extra $20k in pwn2own which even still nobody took) - Chrome just seems unbeatable.

>more generally: real extensions

Agree. Compare for example iMacros for Firefox and iMacros for Chrome, and you see the limitations of the Chrome extension API.

This isn't in support of Chrome or to down FF at all, but for ad blocking I've always just blocked ad networks' DNS addresses from resolving. Just point my router to a vps running DNSmasq and pull down the latest entries from easylist every week and bam - global ad blocking on your network. It has the advantage of allowing blocking on all browsers/systems. Good if you have non-technical peeps using your network too, as it'll save bandwidth and deliver nicer looking pages.

IMHO the biggest thing that Firefox 4 has over Chrome is graphics acceleration via Direct2D on Windows and GL retained layers on the Mac. Chrome has neither in stable builds. Graphics acceleration helps scrolling performance in particular and is what allows things like the Panorama zoom animation to look smooth.

I am not sure if it is in the stable builds, but Chrome dev builds have had an option to enable GPU accelerated compositing in chrome://flags for some time. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed any performance with it on or off. You can read more about it here:

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...

Right. Is it just me or does it seem that most (if not all) of the new features in this release were inspired by Chrome? What is Firefox doing to move the web browsing experience forward?

Some of the best features in Firefox 4 are new web technologies like HTTP Strict Transport Security, WebGL, hardware acceleration, CSS3 calc() and any(), the HTML5 parser, and IndexedDB. Many of these are not yet in Chrome.

See http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/technology/ for a longer list.

Upvoted. Thanks for the link!

For me, search on the address bar is the most important feature that I love about Chrome. IE9 has the same thing now. I am not sure why Firefox 4 did not put search on the address bar. So for a Chrome user, you will greatly miss that feature. :( Until FF integrates that, I am back to using Chrome.

You can search from the address bar in Firefox 4, but you won't get search suggestions as you type. If you want to change this, try: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/omnibar/

(And you can use the "Customize toolbars" window to remove the search bar if you want.)

Firefox intentionally does not show suggestions in the address bar by default, because we don't want to send everything you type there to a third party.

thanks man - I just don't understand why FF didn't just integrate that as a default feature.

The new "menu in the upper left" seems to be rather badly designed. It's missing the "View" menu entirely, which makes it impossible for me to view non-ASCII/Unicode websites. It took me about 5 minutes of searching and frantically right-clicking to re-enable the old menu, which of course still had the View menu.

On a positive note, 4 is so much faster than 3.6 it isn't even funny. It's like going from a 286 running off of an 8-inch floppy to a Core 2 on an SSD.

Character encoding options are now in the "Web Developer" sub-menu of the Firefox menu. (Weird, I know.)

UPDATE: This is different in localized builds - Japanese builds of Firefox should provide easier access to the encoding menu. In other locales, you can go to about:config and toggle "browser.menu.showCharacterEncoding" to see this.

You can also press Alt+V to quickly open the old View menu.

This may confuse the few hundred million users whose languages don't use Roman letters and weren't told about this move...

I'm a user of such a language (Arabic) and by now all websites I care about use utf8, so the character encoding is a problem from the past as far as I'm concerned.

I'd be really surprised if there are still sites that don't use utf8.

Japan still uses Shift-JIS for practically everything, much to the chagrin of anyone else in the world looking to use their applications.

I visit some Japanese websites from time to time (not that I can read or anything .. just clicking on links) and don't remember having many problems with weird characters.

This is because this is required if the site uses a legacy character encoding AND it is declared incorrectly or not at all.

IIRC in those locales the Character Encoding menu is under the main Firefox menu.

Tap "Alt" and you get the normal menus (including "View"). Not very obvious, but easy once you know.

This doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu, at least not for me.

type Alt+v then.

I may be missing something, but character encoding menu is right there when you click Firefox button. 9nth entry from the top for me.

You should never need to change the default encoding. If you have to it means the web page you are viewing is broken.

If you don't mind installing an extension, "Personal Menu" will let you add the View menu and its children to the upper-left menu.

Firefox 4 still has a huge number of UI issues on linux due to reliance on XUL for the UI. There have been improvements in a couple extensions, as far as font colors using GTK themes go, but the menubar is still too tall and has the wrong font color (on basically every GTK theme and theme engine I can find) and keyboard shortcuts for several things (e.g. space to toggle menu items without closing the menu) are removed from GTK. Using RGBA with the murrine GTK engine, alpha transparency leaves "ghosts" on hovered menu options in Firefox, and buttons occasionally completely change their look pre- and post-hover (firebug had a drop-down that would "segment" itself when hovered, for example).

Add this to the completely non-native tabs and toolbar, and the lack of a status bar, and the UI is simply unusable imo. A native UI using an established toolkit, or a custom-built UI with usability in mind would both be preferable to the current halfway kludge.

Firefox 4 still has a huge number of UI issues on linux due to reliance on XUL for the UI

Does that mean that other platforms do not use XUL for UI?

The XUL "backends" for Windows and Mac OS seems to work much better in my experience. For one thing these platforms often have less variance in system theming so things like fixed font colors (though as I mentioned these are fixed in some areas, but not all) are harder to detect and aren't really problematic in most usage.

I'm a web dev and need to keep 3.x around. Can I easily install these two side-by-side or is that going to cause trouble for me? I'd love to use FF4 as my main browser at work (well, in competition with Chrome anyway) but I can't risk messing up 3.

You may use the portable version of firefox from portableapps.com.

Yes, just install it to a different folder. The only thing you need to make sure is to use different profiles for 3 and 4. You should edit the 3 shortcut to point to a dedicated web dev profile.

I have Pale Moon (http://www.palemoon.org) installed for this reason - it is completely separate from the standard Firefox.

Am I the only one that does not understand why Firefox still has a 'Google search' field at the left? Why not use Chrome's approach and merge the two of them - at least give me the possibility to hide it. (And I am aware of the possibility so search in other sites than google, but I 'never' want to do that.)

Mozilla made the decision that it was better to make it absolutely clear to the user when they were making an ordinary web request, and when they were sending trackable information to a third party.

> Why not use Chrome's approach and merge the two of them

I've been asking myself this question many, many times. You can hide the search field: right-click on the toolbar > customize > drag/drop the search inside the window > done.

You're not the only one. I use Seamonkey instead because this and other similar annoyances.

Why not just remove it through "Customize"? You can just right click on any empty spot in the tool bar, click Customize, and then remove the search box. Wouldn't that be easier?

The annoyance is the lack of search functionality in the address bar, not the presence of the search bar.

Everything you type in Chrome's location bar is sent to Google, most likely unencrypted. Every single character.

If you want to turn this behavior on in Firefox, you can do so with a simple add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/omnibar/

but it's off by default because of the MASSIVE privacy implications.

Just because Chrome does that doesn't mean Firefox must do exactly the same.

Merging location bar and search bar doesn't mean you can't give URL higher priority or that you must query search suggestion every key stroke.

If you just want to search from the address bar without suggestions, you can already do that in Firefox 4. Just type a word and press return.

Well, Firefox basically does that already, then. You can enter search terms in the URL bar and hit Enter to search. If you then hide the search box, you've got what you suggest.

Uh, you do know you can turn that off in chrome? I realize it's the default, but those of us who can switch browsers at the drop of a hat can handle it... I think. :-)

Regurgitating my previous response to this [1]:

a) 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.

b) (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..?

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2309115

I'm a little conflicted about the Firefox Sync feature. On the one hand: yay! On the other... it's a lot more difficult to set up sync in Firefox than in Chrome. I got to work today and was dismayed to discover that I couldn't simply login to Mozilla's server and sync up my bookmarks from home, but that I needed the sync key from my computer at home to get this working. Boo. That, or you need to have the devices you want to sync in the same place and use a Netflix-like "Add Device" feature.

I get it. Encrypting locally is more secure, but they've made this system SO secure that it's actually irritating. I wish I at least had the option of foregoing this sync key business.

Anyway, now I know to put my sync key on Dropbox so this doesn't happen again.

Yes, it's a little more complex than Chrome's sync... but Chrome's sync keeps most of your data in cleartext on Google's servers, and even their optional encryption is relatively weak (low-entropy key derived from your password). I don't like that.

Mozilla can't see your data if we tried -- at that includes if we get a subpoena. Firefox Sync's 128-bit secret key has to be transferred somehow. I think that's worth the extra effort, and you only need to do the setup once.

(If you don't trust Mozilla, you can even run your own Sync server.)

Please don't _keep_ your sync key on Dropbox. It's important!

Meh. One of the smoothest features of Chrome (that won a lot of adherents) was how you could close lots of tabs quickly without moving the mouse (i.e. the tabs only re-size after you move the mouse away). Same for opening tabs. How did FF4 not copy this? It looks just like Chrome only crappier.

That small of a nicety overshadows all of the other great things about Firefox 4?

Also, the Firefox team is implementing that but it didn't make it into this release. You can find out all sorts of things they are working on at http://wiki.mozilla.org.

Down-vote, really? I was just giving my first impression, which was 'not better than Chrome' and 'looks clunky'.

Also, Chrome has had that feature for over a year and in that time it's won a lot of praise from a lot of places. Granted, it's just one little feature that doesn't matter that much... but that's what people refer to when they speak of "polish" and "user experience" and I think that stuff matters more to people than you might think.

It's probably for the "only crappier". Makes you sound like an annoying Digg refugee. Read the guidelines at the bottom of HN, it covers both tone/language and complaining about getting downvoted.

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

There is a patch there, it just didn't get reviewed in time for Firefox 4.

I alter FF to put the close button at the end of the tab bar in one fixed location. (it's an about:config option) I like that it doesn't move, mimics the OS Window-close mouse movement (in Windows) but MOST importantly, I think it's a complete waste of space to have an X on every tab.

I had that for FF 3, but now that the tabs are on top it just feels a lot more like Chrome where I'm used to having it on each tab, so I've moved them back on the tabs.

Btw, the relevant option in about:config is "browser.tabs.closeButtons"

Values... 0 - One close button only on the active tab. 1 - Each tabs has its own close button (default) 2 - Removes all close buttons (no close button, right click to select option to close the tab). 3 - Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip bar.

You can also middle click the tab to close it.

ctrl+w is fastest way to close tabs anyway

ctrl+tab to cycle through tabs

I use ctrl+w, but it's too close to ctrl+q. Is there a way to disable ctrl+q in firefox?

Yeah, the Q/W thing is a longstanding annoyance. It's a dumb decision, going back at least as far as the original Mac.

Try Multiple Tab Handler - you select as many tabs as you want using standard list-selection behavior (shift-click or control-click) and do whatever you want (for instance, close) all of them at once.

I find javascript refreshingly faster compared to 3.5 . I no longer even get the "unresponsive script" messages when using the usual lot of JS-abusing pages our "tools support" team has cooked up.

I've observed a major improvement along those lines as well. Sites like news.yahoo.com don't make the browser freak out anymore, hurrah!

Awesome timing. The latest version of chrome (10.0.648.15, Linux x86_64) hangs on Google Reader and doesn't work with Flash for me. That gives me an excuse to play with FF4 rather than futzing around downgrading chrome.

For the devs, you can now run Firebug in FF 4. http://blog.getfirebug.com/2011/03/21/firebug-1-7-0/

Text rendering in Windows is significantly worse - sometimes it's blotchy (random characters seem to have more weight than others) - particularly here on HN, and inter-character spacing is inconsistent; at others, the anti-aliasing looks overdone, and text looks blurry and over-smoothed.

I had Firefox 3 configured such that the main menu, URL box, navigation buttons etc. were all on the same toolbar - the menu bar. In that same configuration, Firefox 4 looks somewhat ugly - there's little space between the bottom of the menu bar and the page content (I also use tree-style tabs).

Apart from how it looks, and how it renders text, it's nice. The resizable gripper on multi-line text boxes is nice - that works well here on HN.

Edit: after disabling hardware acceleration, the text at least is much nicer. I don't notice any loss in performance in simple scrolling etc. with it disabled either.

I also had issues with blurry text while hardware acceleration is enabled.

I assume it is due to the Direct Draw, but I don't see the same issue in IE9 w/ hardware acceleration enabled.

In IE9 h/w acceleration and Direct Write are controlled by the document's rendering mode. Hacker News renders in quirks modes and thus uses GDI. Try forcing the document to render in IE9 mode (open the F12 developer tools, hit Alt-9) and the text will look much closer to Firefox 4's. The page layout will also break a bit.

FF4 is really fast and responsive, as advertised! Awesome work guys!

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but I really love the tab UI feeling that I get in Chromium (the looks, the curves, etc.) Given that other projects like Kod.app already copy that feature, is it possible for Firefox to incorporate it as well?

For those with old ppc Macs, there is a port of FF4 Final at http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Works great for me and is way faster than Safari 5.04 on a iMac G5 and a Powerbook G4 (10.5.8 in both).

I'm hopeful for the speed improvements; I was having issues with 3.6.x in that and so far 4 seems good but I've not really stressed it.

Otherwise, confess first impressions are less happy. Moving the tab bar has left it stranded adjacent to neither the edge of the window nor the page which makes it less easy to quickly grab sight of for me, and I seem to have lost the shortcut for the search box which I actually _used_ - if this replicated the old suite's behaviour of location bar searching outside the history I'd mind less, but it doesn't. Having to grab the pointer every time I want to search instead of Ctrl-E doesn't seem a win to me :-(

Ctrl-K seems to work for selecting the search bar in the v.4.0.

Thanks; I wonder why they changed it but didn't put a tooltip on the component advertising the new shortcut? I'm sure that used to be there on at least some older versions of Firefox.

Ctrl+k has always worked, it is not new. (And as long as I can remember has been the "primary" short-cut.) They wanted Ctrl+e to be available for tab group functionality: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592183

We can kill old keyboard shortcuts. There are two for focusing the search box (ctrl/cmd + e, ctrl/cmd + k) and technically only one is needed. Many of these things are here for legacy reasons supporting users of IE5 and Netscape 3. That can, thankfully, go away.

I'm impressed with it.

Its UI is clear and responsive, and overall is seems quicker. Plus it uses up around 40% less RAM (in my experiences).

I've been using the betas over chrome for a few months now. They've redone the UI, it's stabler, less memory intensive, and the UI is completely redone. It's definitely worth checking out even if you enjoy chrome.

I really would like to see a built-in PDF viewer–that's one of my favorite features in Chrome because it keeps the download folder clean and lets me reference several PDFs/pages without leaving the window.

Why is text aliased and ugly in Firefox 4?

This is usually a graphics driver problem. Try updating your drivers or disable hardware acceleration in the Firefox preferences (under Advanced: General: Browsing).

Disabling hardware acceleration worked for me.

I'm on Windows 7, and now, with it disabled, it looks like Cleartype is working as it should. With hardware acceleration enabled, it looks like Cleartype isn't working, but Firefox doing its own anti-aliasing, and doing a worse job of it. Does that sound reasonable?

I don't understand why getting anti-aliasing right is so hard. Just render text a few times bigger, use some kind of low-pass filter (box filter will do) and down-sample it. It's what every graphics program does. That would put an end to using Photoshop or Flash for headlines just to make them look decent.

Because that's a very CPU and memory inefficient way of doing it. If you value performance, you don't want to render something "a few times bigger" filter it and then scale it down. You want to render the text and anti-alias it at the same time. And that's not a trivial thing.

Cleartype uses subpixel rendering as well, I'm not so sure you can achieve that by simply down-sampling a larger render.

Actually, while it will do that it also tries to shift edges to lie on pixel boundaries when possible. This distortion can make edges look clearer though it also looks brutal with certain type faces. Most people like whatever they are used to.

wladimir: Up-sample/filter/down-sample is the standard way of doing it, and any other way will just be an optimization of that transformation.

For graphics, yes, but not for fonts. If you scale text linearly, it just looks bad at smaller sizes, which is why vectorized fonts come with plenty of rendering hints. Add to that subpixel rendering and a lot of other typography rules, and font rendering is suddenly pretty difficult to get right.

Try it yourself, make an image of some text in 80px, shrink it 8 times, and compare that to the same text rendered as 10px. You'll notice that the shrunken image is harder to read than the actual text.

With hardware acceleration, Windows DirectWrite is handling the text rendering. Unfortunately, there are bugs in many graphics drivers that interfere with this.

Update after talking to Mozilla graphics hacker Joe Drew:

What I wrote above used to be true, but in current versions of Windows/Firefox these bugs have been fixed, and what you're seeing is probably the intended rendering.

The reason it looks blurry is that Microsoft's accelerated DirectWrite API uses different font rendering than the old GDI API. The DirectWrite rendering is less agressively hinted, and looks more like Mac OS X font rendering.

If you don't like the look of the text rendering on our system, try: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearType/tuner/tune.asp...

> The reason it looks blurry is that Microsoft's accelerated DirectWrite API uses different font rendering than the old GDI API.

Oh. Well, that sucks, because it means that I have to choose between hardware acceleration and readable fonts.

> If you don't like the look of the text rendering on our system [...]

That makes no sense. First, it's for Vista and not Windows 7, and second, I've already tuned Cleartype on my system. Even if it's possible to change my settings so it looks good in Firefox with hardware acceleration, changing it means it will look bad everywhere else.

Mozilla folks are looking into fixes for this:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/M4IBj...

I'm afraid that is just how it is. Hardware-accelerated font rendering through DirectWrite (in both FF4 and IE9) is of a lower quality than the software (GDI) rendering.

The only solution: disable it in Options. Sux.

It's really annoying. People say it looks more like Safari. I don't agree, it's just fuzzy and ugly. I was trolling the internet to find a solution to no avail.

For anyone upgrading firefox on ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

I am so glad they got rid of the link preview in the URL bar (like they had in the RCs) and instead put in on the bottom left.

Usually, I have tabs open that change their title when something happens (e.g. Gmail Inbox(1), or Facebook), and those catch my attention from the corner of my eye. However, having the URL preview when hovering over a link go into the URL bar on top also catches my attention, and distracts me from my current workflow.

I was REALLY hopeful for FF to make a comeback with 4. I had been a convert in the 2.X days and watched as it got bloated and slower throughout 3. Switched to Chrome in version 9 and never looked back. Then IE9 came out and was so much faster than before so I had hope for FF.

Well, that hope has been quickly dashed. How? By mozilla's own demo page, the web'o'wonder. On my three year old machine it says my video drivers don't support WebGL and won't play nice with many things. What it does play nice with was not very wonderful. The "Letterheads" were choppy with a framerate probably approaching 8 or 9 fps. The 360 video refused to load. Same with Remixing Reality. IE9 wouldn't work with those and neither would Safari.

Then I tried them in Chrome. Huh. Go figure. They all worked marvelously. Yup... this new web era could be a Web o' Wonders... but it looks like it won't be featuring FF4 or IE9.

Now, can anyone tell me why FF4 has issues with WebGL but Chrome 11.0696 doesn't? And it's not just a webkit thing because Safari 5.04 isn't liking them either.

Old graphics drivers usually have severe stability issues, so Mozilla blacklists them. You need to update to more recent ones -- anything after around June 2010 should do. Check out about:support for more information. (Note that if you're on Linux Mozilla only whitelists the proprietary nvidia driver IIRC, since all the open source drivers have issues.)

I don't think chrome has blacklisted anything yet, but from what I hear Google's looking at doing it.

In general, the problem is with your computer, and not with your browser or the demos.

When one browser (in this case, Chrome) works beautifully and the other browser (in this case FF4) refuses to operate in some capacity then that is most certainly not a problem with my computer.

Do you know how many people out there have the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family for their laptops... a staggering number, I'm sure.

All you need to do is update to newer drivers. You can also force enable stuff via about:config if you wish, and at your own risk.

The blacklisting is simply risk aversion -- I'm sure you're familiar with the concept. A slow browser's better than a crashing one, and old drivers were crashing too frequently. I repeat: the problem is not with Firefox -- the problem is with your drivers. Chrome might be taking more chances with the stability of your drivers, but that's Chrome's problem.

Just installed it on my netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04.

Motherfucking beautiful, guys, it feels like Christmas morning. Great work, keep it up. (And I'm so stoked the Vimperator plugin works on launch, kudos to that team too!).

Just working out the best way to install it side-by-side with 3.6 on my workstation, which I'll need to keep a while for web dev testing.

I am surprised that they got rid of the padlock icon. I had to Google before I realized that they now use a colored section with the site name in the address bar to show a secure connection. Not very obvious when you first start using it.

I wonder if this change is going to be disruptive for users who are trained to look for a padlock icon.

This is an intentional change because we believe the padlock icon is misleading and potentially harmful. Users were being told to "look for the padlock" as a sign that a transaction was secure, when really it means no such thing.

It's important that users actually verify the identity of the site -- a "secure" (encrypted) transaction is no good if it's a secure connection to a malicious site. The new security UI in Firefox is designed to emphasize identity, rather than just encryption.

Feel free to watch our launch party here: http://air.mozilla.com/

Too bad you're using Flash.

air.mozilla.com normally uses HTML5 video, but the back-end that drives that was not ready for Firefox 4 launch day traffic.

And to mark the occasion FF4 RC2 just crashed on me twice in a row. Are there any crashing issues fixed in the production release compared to RC2?

Also, the IE-style reload button (at the right end of the address field) is too small and awkwardly positioned. I never realized how often it is actually used.

RC2 is bit-for-bit identical to the final release - we did not make any changes after RC2.

You can right-click the reload button and choose "Customize" and drag it to a different location if you want. (It will become a full-sized button.) You can actually rearrange/remove/add any of the toolbar items this way.

Thanks for the hint.

FF3 had a problem with gradually slowing down to a crawl. Clicking on the link would take few seconds to register, switching between tabs or from another app to FF would also cause FF to appear frozen for several seconds, etc.

Submitted a ticket regarding this, got multiple follow-up comments from other users, but never from a dev. I realize you have a volume to deal with, but on my end it looks like noone cares.

FF4 still has a milder version of the problem, but in a sub-second range. It now crashes though, so not sure what's worse.

Also, unrelated to the above, for some reason Alt-PrtSc does not work, it's FF4 on XP. It is supposed to make a screenshot of a focused window and put it on a clipboard, and it worked with FF3... which is weird, because it's Windows' native function, not Firefox's.

You might want to try running in a fresh profile, to see if anything in your old profile is causing the problem: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/

Sorry about your unanswered bug - it's pretty hard for us to address general performance bugs that don't have specific steps to reproduce. We have to focus on fixing what we can see or measure, and hope that it fixes what users are seeing too.

Thanks for the response, Matt. Much appreciated.

Congrats to the team and thank you to everyone who contributed (even the smallest bugfix) to help us all.

After having some serious problems with the beta, I'm actually very impressed with this release. Even on my parents' old ex-council computer (1ghz P4, 512mb RAM, integrated graphics) this release is lightning fast!

Neat! Seems like a leap in performance then.

Does anyone have JavaScript performance benchmarks yet against Chrome?

http://arewefastyet.com/

Firefox user here since phoenix, switched to Chrome and never looked back. You can't come to par with Chrome to make me switch back, you have to make me shit my pants to do so, and Chrome did when they were the first to bring websockets to the browser. They kept bringing good stuff like web inspector, so no need to download firebug or any other extension. And joining the search bar with the address bar is just genius.

In short, I prefer my browser naked, and Chrome is the best without clothes.

Damn them - damn them to hell. The thing that Firefox 3 did in Winidows (XP anyway) that was so useful was that when you deleted trash or spam, it automatically put the pointer on the OK button. Not the OS preference, but a Firefox feature. It didn't work in OS X, but it worked in XP. They took that feature away - I saw it in the beta, but was hoping they really hadn't deleted it. Damn them.

OK, other than that, I like FF4! Just had to vent.

Firefox is a browser; how do you delete spam from a browser?

Very nice, the UI is well designed, more screen estate.

Just 2 complaints:

- The colors's arrows for previous/next are not really visible

- When on a laptop, I used to open a link in a new tab by right click + open in a new tab. This option was the second one in the previous firefox's version, now it's the first, so I end up opening a lot of links in new window instead of new tab, guess it's only a matter of time till I get the habit :)

There's an extension called "Menu Editor" that allows you to edit the context menus in Firefox. It works, but it can be confusing to use, because the context menus are... so contextual.

In your case though, you could just swap the places of the "New Window" and "New Tab" menu items.

Edit: here's a link to the extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/menu-editor/

Thanks for the info and the link!

I hope the addons also get updated for FF4. I upgraded to FF4, but I miss having the CS Lite addon.

'CS Lite' lets me manage cookie permissions for current site without having to go into the preference and go through the long process. Very useful since I usually block cookies and only turn on when needed. The reviews for CS Monster doesn't seem as good.

Sometimes you can work around this.

Find the install.rdf file for the plugin, and change the maxVersion variable to "4.*".

It doesn't always work, but I've had good luck with it.

Thanks. I'll give it a try later tonight.

I just noticed that FF4 also has shiny new javascript confirm and alert popups, complete with a lightbox effect. Nice!

And not only are they shiny... they no longer prevent you from switching to other tabs!

This is one of the features I wished Chrome has. It is really nice!

I still like Opera the most. Easily the most innovative browser and much more enjoyable to use.

Will Firefox 3.x auto update to 4?

Just checked, and it doesn't (Mac)

Mine didn't seem to (Windows 7 Enterprise, 64-bit).

The first thing I did after manually downloading and installing was to re-visit http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/, posted here a few days ago. Amazing.

win7, I tried update (using the menu) with no luck, but the install process was easy (installed it in my old ff folder and it upgraded everything) and all my settings were kept.

Some of my plug-ins are no longer compatible though...

IT works!! go to help -> check for updates

Historically major updates have been offered only after a minor release or two.

Yes, but not yet. We won't start pushing advertised updates to Firefox 3.x users until a bit after the launch, to give time for any late-breaking issues to shake out.

It updated to 4 for me (on Mac), although it goes in sequential order; e.g. if there's any 3.x you didn't get it seems to update that first, then on relaunch another update-check gets version 4.

The new vimperator is out as well, and it's great. this is way better than crome now.

Aw... i just wish they didnt swap "new tab" and "new window" in the right-click on link menu. I understand the decision, but im so used to the previous setup that I get owned every time :/

Apart from that, im really happy with this new version!

I've been a Chrome user (OS X) for a while, but switched to FF4RC to see if it used less memory than Chrome (not a difficult feat).

It was mostly great, except the UI would stop responding at random for minutes at a time. So I'm back on Chrome.

Is Flash not installed by default?

Downloaded FF4 and several sites won't display.

Ex: Youtube says "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video."

Other sites just don't work.

Maybe I'm out of loop and need to update my desktop flash.

Man, chrome has ruined me with its auto-updating.

FF4 add on collection selected by Mozilla https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla...

I'd like to try to switch a browser, if I see a simple and cool sync-from-chrome (google account) feature. maybe I don't really need one, and maybe I can use some XML thingy for it, but I'm too lazy

Here's a mirror, just in case there are others for whom the main download site is estimating nine hrs to go. (Mac OS X version)

  http://www.macupdate.com/download/10700/Firefox%204.0.dmg

I couldn't find any PPAs or packages for Ubuntu, yet. Did anyone else?

It's in the firefox-stable PPA now for 10.04 and 10.10:

Instructions here: http://askubuntu.com/q/6339/235

Does anyone know if they're doing one for 9.10? Googled around, can't find anything on it

Firefox market share is going to continue to shrink as Chrome takes over. They've just been way too slow to respond. It is a shame since feature wise Firefox is a superior browser.

Not necessarily. The two are about at market share parity now, and FF4 allows Mozilla to push updates and version numbers more continuously, like Chrome/ium. From this point on it should be a neck-and-neck horse race, but frankly as long as they're both leaving IE in the dust I'm cheering for, and using/developing to/supporting both.

Uhg. Had to roll back to 3.6

The new one looks great and seems to run fast, but my most important add-ons weren't supported. I hate being held back by my add-ons, but I have no choice.

Please help and advice your friends and family to update :)

Lets help mozilla!

No, I will push that moment into the future as far as possible.

Developers underestimate the trouble of "normal people" to adjust to GUIs and then even more to drastic changes in those. At least half of my "customers" for pc support will be rendered helpless once this upgrade comes.

More importantly: Is FireBug available yet for FireFox 4?

Yes!

http://blog.getfirebug.com/2011/03/21/firebug-1-7-0/

Using FF4 on Hacker News main page gives me a popup saying TypeError: a.textContent is undefined.

I'm not seeing that. Do you have any add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts installed? Try safe mode: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+mode

Three finger scroll up and down for home/end in OS X is really nice... I wish this worked in chrome.

Wow. Is it me, or do those 'monster characters' on the landing page so really, really amateurish?

Has anyone else noticed that you can't drag the window from one space to another under OS X?

I thought so too, but it actually works (on 10.6 at least). You must only know where the other spaces are located: North, South,East or West.

Or you can type F8 (default) and drag windows between them that way . . .

Have they improved the ability to manage Firefox settings in an enterprise environment?

Hopefully we won't have to wait long for Firefox 5 cause Chrome is not sitting still :)

Three months.

We'll believe it when we see it, but we're definitely rooting for you.

just ticked over 6,000,000 downloads (in < 22 hours). well done guys

Edit: USA has top spot at the moment with 1.2 million, followed by Germany with almost 550 thousand

Great new browser...Heads off firefox guys..

Its very fast compared to firefox 3.6.

tab key in form elements is not working. or it's just for me ?

Probably just you. There could be a Flash embed in the page that's capturing the keystroke...

Doesn't work with my loved Quake Live plugin yet... uninstall :)

Count me impressed. I use netbooks a lot and FF4 gave me the best browsing experience I've ever tried on a 10"-screen, Atom-CPU powered PC. Performance improvements and the amount of space it saves on a small screen for my usage are pretty amazing. Kudos Mozilla for another great release!

EDIT: Just noticed that FF4 allows me to resize text-fields that render quite small because of the small screen. Small, relative-sized text-fields can be easily resized to a convenient size.

I'm on a netbook too (old one: 901), and FF is my preferred desktop/dev browser, but Runfield is unplayably slow in FF4(2-3fps maybe) on my netbook, whereas Chrome (10.0.6b) feels like it's hitting 15-20fps.

Two things:

1. Sync is totally not up to par. It doesn't inform what it does in the background and there is no place to check on the web what it uploads. I am not sure why FF even bothered to release this feature when it is not even ready (there are several people complaining about many things of Sync at the Add-on review).

2. The bookmark/history manager can use upgrade/better features. Ever since the Delicious fiasco, FF could possibly play a better role in adding modern bells and whistles to its bookmarks manager.

Other than above two, I'm not complaining.

Sync intentionally doesn't allow you to see your data on the web: it's encrypted. If you could view it through a webpage, it could be stolen or subpoenaed, and we're not willing to take that risk with your passwords and history.

If you want to see what Sync is doing, you can add the Sync icon to the Add-on toolbar. If you really want to see what it's doing, turn on logging and look in about:sync-log!

Okay, I'll give these two suggestions a try. Sync worked the first time for me but then it just stopped. It no longer brings my stuff over to new profile/install, so I was curious to see if my data is even there or not (which is not a big deal as I have backup and I was just testing). It would help to have an activity monitor somewhere or a way to check the percentage of syncing done.

Speaking of private data and encryption, do you know which FF file is responsible for History data? I know the Bookmarks json file but I'm looking to keep my history file as a backup too (which I believe FF doesn't backup like it does bookmarks). I hope it isn't places.sqlite file because it gets ridiculously huge even after you wipe your data clean.

I wish to rely on my own backup system for both bookmarks and history data as both of them are important on continuous basis and both of them should be user's own responsibility (unlike what delicious or many other bookmarks syncing services may tell you).

Yes, places.sqlite stores the history. The reason it grows by large increments (and does not shrink to very small sizes) is to prevent file fragmentation, which can have a big effect on the speed of the browser.

And, I'd assume that even if deleting history doesn't shrink places.squlite, someone who wants to create a backup will be compressing it. And a mostly empty but large file should compress to a tiny file, right?

The idea of Sync is that it Just Works(tm) in the background. Creating lots of UI noise as you browse the web (history, tabs, etc. are all synced!) doesn't seem very helpful nor useful.

Sync used to give constant information about what it was doing, but this was explicitly removed as unnecessary noise. It does inform you if sync fails, which covers the only case when I'd want feedback.

Addons manager looks nice and useful compared to previous one but still I know many people who would prefer to use package managers for managing addons

Still my Pareto principle usage of FF: Firebug + Web dev. Toolbar.

If only those extentions functions exactly the same with webkit browsers.If only...Does anybody hearing me?

You can download the Firefox 4 Final from here : http://www.techsavys.info/2011/03/firefox-4-final-downloads-...

Or you could download it right from mozilla's own website, http://firefox.com and bypass the blogspam.

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