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Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 With Speed Enhancements and New Look

For those of you with really buggy Firefox problems (not performance or memory ones), try exporting your bookmarks, then deleting your Firefox profile:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

Restart Firefox, it will create a new profile, and then re-import your bookmarks. You'll lose cookies and other settings in the process (not sure if they can be exported).

This process has solved Firefox issues I've had in the past, and it worked for a friend this weekend. Unfortunately, I've switched to Chrome, but Chrome may not be an option for everyone since it's a memory hog if you open many tabs as I do.
 
gerbilbox said:
This process has solved Firefox issues I've had in the past, and it worked for a friend this weekend. Unfortunately, I've switched to Chrome, but Chrome may not be an option for everyone since it's a memory hog if you open many tabs as I do.
Click to expand...

I always do a clean install of Firefox when they launch a major revision. Who wants all the old junk cluttering things up?
 
I run Chrome 10 (beta release cycle) as my main browser, but wanted to check out the different Sunspider 0.9.1 benchmarks of the different browsers. All non-scientific of course.

Chrome 10.0.648.82 beta - 283.1ms +/- 2.0%

Firefox 4 - 269.7ms +/- 0.9%

Safari 5.0.4 (6533.20.27) - 270.7ms +/- 1.1%

All run from:
http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html
 
Ping Guo said:
Ghostery and AdBlock are both available on Chrome.
Click to expand...

Yet they aren't as refined as the Firefox version, AdBlock especially. Think about it; why would a browser made by an ad company allow an extension that blocks its own ads? If I download something like AdBlock, I want the peace of mind knowing that it will block all ads, including Google's own. The AdBlock Plus Beta, however, works very nicely on Chrome from what I've heard/read.
 
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)

Hopefully, Apple will make this possible between iDevices and Safari in iOS 5.
Click to expand...

Apple offers syncing of bookmarks through iTunes, or wirelessly with MobileMe.

I will need to use Firefox for academic purposes because of the Zotero plugin. For everything else, I'll probably use Safari.
 
batchtaster said:
I really cannot figure out the obsession with Chrome. It's Safari WebKit with a new skin and simplified prefs.
Click to expand...

You really have no idea, if you think that's all there is to it.

Let me name just one important advantage of Chrome over Safari: Tabs running in independent processes. That means if one website crashes it will only bring down one tab, and not the whole browser. This feature will FINALLY be implemented in Safari on Lion.
 
I've been using Firefox 4 since the first release candidate a few weeks ago and I'm absolutely loving it. It's so much faster than Chrome or Safari on my machine, and Firefox add-ons are true add-ons.

For example, the adblocker in Chrome still loads the ads, but just doesn't display them. You still get the slowdowns and extra bandwidth of loading them. What's the point of that?

Firefox doesn't load them at all, and simply blocks all the tracking and ad links without loading them. That's the way it should be.
 
rickdollar said:
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.
Click to expand...

Just download Xmarks! It's a cross-browser & cross-OS utility.

Also try LastPass for secure password syncing!
 
They got rid of the little bubble that hides the toolbar :( I hate the top of Chrome and how much space, etc. it takes up. And now Firefox has copied it and made it the default, while removing one of my most used features. At least they put options in there to switch some of it back, but the bubble appears to be gone for good, now I have to go to the menu and uncheck two things if I want to hide everything up top when I'm browsing.
 
Consultant said:
I run Safari with up to 100 tabs. Doesn't crash.

I do have flash blocker installed though.
Click to expand...

Same here. I also have loads of tabs set up in Safari, (not 100 though) and never have it crash, and I also have click to flash installed. I can't understand how so many people say they have Safari crash, it never crashes on me. I can only think it may be to do with flash. Having said that, I use flash whenever I choose to, and have no problems with Safari. :confused:
 
I like FF 4. The memory usage and speed definitely shows improvement when I have a large number of tabs open. I'm still getting used to the new look, however (it's not bad, just very different from what I'm used to).
 
croooow said:
200pxfirefoxclinteastwo.jpg

I hope they worked out the bugs (at least the major ones) I tried the FF4 Beta on 3 computers and had lots of issues on all three (1 Mac 2 Windows)

I'll stick with Chrome for now.
Click to expand...

"They must be flying on vapour!"
 
Well at first I was really excited to see the Pinned Tabs feature in FireFox 4. I was hoping it would be a locked tab, but the problem is that when you type in a URL while in the Pinned Tab, it opens the URL in that tab instead of a new tab.

So basically, if you have G-Mail pinned. Then type in MacRumors.com in the URL bar while in your pinned G-Mail tab, MacRumors will now become the pinned Tab.

If they can get URLS in Pinned Tabs to open in new tabs, this will be perfect!
 
I'm running it just to experience that chap's "Jaegermonkey" sounds bloody brilliant!

Haven't found it yet though...
 
Still hideously ugly. Uses non standard Cocoa widgets, weirdo toolbar sheet, them menu organization is mess, nothing remotely like a Mac app and the key commands assigned are poorly thought out, unless one happened to be a retard. Preferences are typical of a Windows app, disorganized, poorly arrnged and require way too much clicking wpto get to things that open dialog after dialog. Annoying.

Stay away from this ported windows junk ware until they get someone (a real Mac dev) who can re-design a full and compliant Cocoa UI.
 
djp2 said:
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)



Apple offers syncing of bookmarks through iTunes, or wirelessly with MobileMe.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it doesn't sync history or open tabs.
 
I've always stuck to Safari but have recently got annoyed with it.

My only real hate about Firefox is that it puts a silly little low-res symbol next to each bookmark in the Bookmark Toolbar which makes it look really dated and messy.

Is it possible to stop it doing this?
 
cpu

Consultant said:
FF3 is more cpu intensive than safari or chrome. Not sure about FF4 though.
Click to expand...

FF3 might be slightly more CPU intensive than Chrome, but chrome sucks a lot more memory and system resources when used similarly. multiple pages, many tabs.
 
currently

emulator said:
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. :D
Click to expand...

Well, currently most of my macs only have 4gb, some can't even take 8gb without some finagling, not to mention $$$ for the pair of 4GB chips. I use a lot of apps, trading and virtualization, and therefore don't really want my browser to bog down the system too much. Indeed, I can manage it without issue now, but for example if I moved exclusively to chrome for my all in one browser it just would not work at all. WAAY too much RAM and other system resource utilization.
 
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