FireFox 4 Beta 7 Released

[Tharic-Nar]

Normally, we wouldn't announce new versions of beta software, but a rare exception can be made here. Firefox 4 has been at the forefront of my mind for quite a while, promising much needed enhancements to a somewhat aged browser. Firefox 3 was met with a fair amount of criticism, it was slow compared to the competition, lacked feature sets such as plugin separation, and suffered numerous small, annoying bugs. Over time, much of these had been cleaned up and extra features slowly added, but its overall performance has remained sluggish.

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[Glider]

If it still needs +1 min to start up, it'll be gone as quickly as it is installed

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Start times are much faster, still not chrome fast, but much faster than FF 3. First Run is slow though (first as in, after install), so bare that in mind, probably to do with configuration and database stuff, but it runs quick after that.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Sounds like they still need to speed things up. The load times have been unacceptable. Firefox used to be lean and mean; now it's become bloated. I guess it got fat on all that market share it ate up.

 

[DarkStarr]

They keep breaking all the good themes...... I love Redshift but the developer seems to have pretty much forgotten about his themes since v3 of FF and now v4 is breaking a lot of it >.<

 

[Tharic-Nar]

After some more use, there are still a few niggles i have. One, the new UI is taking a little getting used to, namely the page reload is now on the far right of the address bar, rather than with the back, forward and home buttons. Also, the link address that was normally in the bottom left is now next to the address bar, so long time reflexive viewers will now need to retrain your glance to the new areas.

Startup time would be fast, but for some reason, it's choking on my system, upon launch, tab headers appear and then the whole thing locks up for a min, doing whatever. So still has bugs.

In terms of developing web standards, it's almost on par with chrome now, so browsing CSS3 and HTML 5 pages are less likely to break. No Flash related issues so far either. Support for plugins will naturally be sketchy due to a new major version transition. A lot of the key and actively developed ones will still work.

The new tab management is kind of funky, i'm still not used to it yet, not to mention later versions will probably change the way it behaves, but so far so good. You can group large collections of tabs together into a single group and launch the group instead of each tab. So you can save a 'workspace' as it were with other apps instead of relying on the restore state feature. This i'm still experimenting with, so we'll see how it goes. After using chrome for so long and having those 8 most common used sites right infront of you in a new tab... little hard to tear away from the convenience.