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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

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

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* 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.

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).

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.

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).

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...

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.

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!

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.

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