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Comment by Dobbs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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