Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 With Speed Enhancements and New Look

[cult hero]

The speed improvements are noticeable pretty much immediately.

While I like the interface better, on the Mac the tabs are not nearly as efficient as Chrome's and, after using Chrome for about a year, I really like the combined address and search bar. It's just better one basically all counts.

That said, I use Firefox for development primarily. Firebug is just plain awesome. (And, it's nice to have another browser around that I can have in private mode constantly so I know I have a clean development environment.)

 

[TxdoHawk]

Heh, it still takes forever to load on Windows...

Really? I've been using it on an Atom netbook (previously used Chrome, FF3 took for-ever to load on it) and while it's still not Chrome-fast at startup, I found the startup time to be much, much improved.

 

[griz]

Did he say JaegerMonkey? I want it just for that reason alone.

 

[Rot'nApple]

I tried the FF4 Beta on 3 computers and had lots of issues on all three (1 Mac 1 Windows)

New Math?

Must be WI math...
/
/
/

 

[batchtaster]

I really cannot figure out the obsession with Chrome. It's Safari WebKit with a new skin and simplified prefs. Sometimes it's handy to have a fourth browser lying around, but it doesn't do anything every other browser doesn't do. I've used it and it's as advanced as every other browser was when they were as new to market as it is (in spite of the supposed version 11, it's more accurately 1.11). Just seems to be hipsters drawn by the Google brand name on it.

 

[Consultant]

Can't wait to download it. I'm sick of Safari constantly crashing.

I run Safari with up to 100 tabs. Doesn't crash.

I do have flash blocker installed though.

 

[haruhiko]

Unfortunately Google Chrome has already taken my heart, for a long time...

 

[Brentus]

Sorry Mozilla, but you're the Zune to Google's iPod IMO. Chrome FTW.

 

[BillyBobBongo]

This is random, but is there a way to hide the icons next to the bookmarks on the toolbar?

I'm looking in to how to do that too, it just looks so messy.

 

[Consultant]

can anyone comment on memory usage of this version. While i DO like chrome, it consumes SO MUCH MEMORY when doing a bit of tabbed browsing. I'm finally happy with my settings for FF3.x, and the memory usage but don't want to move backwards with FF4

FF3 is more cpu intensive than safari or chrome. Not sure about FF4 though.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

10.5 Leopard--but Intel only, right?

http://www.tenfourfox.com/

;-)

 

[pjarvi]

So far videos on Engadget are still jumping up and down on the page, even when the page is not being scrolled (may be a Flash issue?), and the lightning deals on Amazon's Gold Box do not work correctly. Had to stick with IE8 on my Windows machine at work, for now. MacRumors seems to work perfectly fine though!

 

[emulator]

can anyone comment on memory usage of this version. While i DO like chrome, it consumes SO MUCH MEMORY when doing a bit of tabbed browsing. I'm finally happy with my settings for FF3.x, and the memory usage but don't want to move backwards with FF4

Why does it matter? Memory is super cheap again, just put in at least 8GB; even in my Windows 7 boot (pagefile disabled) when PS CS5 gets 50% of memory and all kinds of programs are open, everything is fast. SSD helps the matter tho8gh, the real bottleneck in computers are the HDs. They are great for storing all the downloads though.

 

[John-117]

Tried it out, but I still vastly prefer Chrome over it. Chrome is just a lot more efficient with the combo address/search bar; not to mention it's still noticeably faster to me.

 

[JRoDDz]

Not a fan of the new UI, if I wanted Chrome UI I would just download Chrome. Luckily I can customize the UI. What's with the home button all the way on the right?

 

[Dr McKay]

And after only 2 dozen betas

 

[alvindarkness]

It wont be replacing safari for me, but so far it has impressed with its speed. Maybe I'll give it a fair go by trying to use it exclusively for a week.

I would want to try chrome except I've blocked google.com, google-analytics.com, blogsearch.google.com and so forth at my router. Oh wait, no I wouldnt want to try chrome at all.

 

[Stella]

This is a very nice upgrade.. and the speed performance is very noticeably.

Though I'll still use Safari for mac but continue to use FF for Linux and windows, FF on Mac for development.

If I use FF3.6 and then run FF4 - I get graphic glitches - duplication of icons appearing when customizing the navigation bar area.

 

[croooow]

New Math?

I need a proofreader!

And fixed... Cheers!

 

[Ping Guo]

No problems here. I love it. I'll take firefox with ghostery (blocks trackers), better privacy (deletes flash "cookies") and ad blocker plus over chrome or safari any day. V4 is much faster. The speed difference is like night and day.

Ghostery and AdBlock are both available on Chrome.

 

[jive turkey]

The speed improvements are noticeable pretty much immediately.

While I like the interface better, on the Mac the tabs are not nearly as efficient as Chrome's and, after using Chrome for about a year, I really like the combined address and search bar. It's just better one basically all counts.

For the record, you can do that with firefox. That is the way I have it setup.

 

[iBunny]

Too little too late.

Safari never gets updated. Once in a blue moon. Whole browser crashes sometime.

Firefox was slow.

Chrome is the way to go. With its instanced Tabs and its speed. Its easily the best browser currently.

 

[mcmlxix]

Ok on topic, I use FF for two things only:

One site I visit that when I use Safari the site thinks I have cookies turned off. I do need cookies for this site. So I use FF.

Ripping video media from web pages with DownloadHelper. It’s so simple and the method in Safari is a ridiculous chore.

I doubt there’s any compelling reason for me to use FF4.

People here keep mentioning Chrome. I’ve avoided it because I don’t trust Google. Can anyone speak (or send me a note) on privacy or lack of in Chrome?

 

[saxon48]

Even in Safe Mode, FF still has abnormally high RAM usage. And the really annoying part is where the CPU idles. For instance, on Chromium and Safari, just 1 tab (facebook) idles at no more than 2% CPU, while in FF it's around 10.

 

[rickdollar]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

I like the idea of being able to sync your bookmarks, history, and open tabs with your "mobile device."
Hopefully, Apple will make this possible between iDevices and Safari in iOS 5.