Thread: Firefox 4

I downloaded the Firefox 4 beta today, and I am impressed. It addresses many of my grievances that I had with Firefox 3 regarding speed.

Firefox 3 was slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. It took hours to start up compared to Chrome, the "awesome bar" would often hang while loading the bookmarks database into memory (making it not live up to its name), and there would be constant "small freezes" here and there while loading PDF files and such where I wouldn't be able to use my browser for a second or two because something is loading.

It looks like Firefox 4 has made all of that asynchronous (as it should be). From my experience so far, I am still able to use the browser while certain things load, and the awesome bar now lives up to its name (not hanging while loading the entire bookmarks database).

Have yall downloaded it and tried it out?

There's still a few seconds wait time when first starting up the browser, but it seems less than Firefox 3.

Originally Posted by Devils Child

- Opening firefox automaticly opens all ever-closed popup windows from the past hours
- these focus cues! ah... on every button, tab and image, when you click it, you see a focus rectangle! i gave a feedback on this, hope they remove tem...

How you checked to see if these features could be disabled in about:config? I find it hard to believe there is no option for them.

Originally Posted by Devils Child

- i'd really like to see native vista styles on the bookmarks treeview. i mean like SetWindowTheme(hTreeView, "explorer", null); to make it look more "windows native" like in vista/7 explorer

Unlikely for what is intended to be a cross-platform browser. The idea is that if one were to use Firefox on Linux or OSX, it would have the same look and feel as it does on Windows. This kind of demand requires that the application doesn't have too much look and feel of a specific host operating system.


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I haven't tried Firefox 4, yet. I'll give it a look when I get home and voice my opinion.

Unlikely for what is intended to be a cross-platform browser

i guess they wouldnt have built in tabs-on-glass and stuff. besides, they are using lots of native stuff, eg. the mainmenu and the toolstrips. they are not modified, looking exactly like the OS provides them

also, on mac, the mainmenu strip is on top of the screen, which is mac-typical - and they're not changing it, because it should fit into the OS

edit: i mean like this: http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/1027/62586064nt6.png

but i guess they don't just read my feedback and implement the stuff i suggested... or would they?

Originally Posted by Devils Child

i guess they wouldnt have built in tabs-on-glass and stuff. besides, they are using lots of native stuff, eg. the mainmenu and the toolstrips. they are not modified, looking exactly like the OS provides them

also, on mac, the mainmenu strip is on top of the screen, which is mac-typical - and they're not changing it, because it should fit into the OS

I'd have to look at Firefox 4 to know what you're talking about. Are you sure that these things aren't handled by the window manager rather than the application itself? (i.e. Here is the tabs, put it into whatever you consider the main bar and format it to look however a standard tab would look)

Funny, I have no problems with Firefox 3 whatsoever. I do not use themes, granted. I find that wearing women's underwear is more interesting. But have installed a large number of plugins. It takes ~5 seconds to fire up. And when I do, I take those 5 seconds to think about my life, those I love and my plans for the future.

You guessed it. It doesn't leave much time.

Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

Unlikely for what is intended to be a cross-platform browser. The idea is that if one were to use Firefox on Linux or OSX, it would have the same look and feel as it does on Windows. This kind of demand requires that the application doesn't have too much look and feel of a specific host operating system.

I believe it has always been the aim of Firefox to look native on all of its platforms.

While I have FF4 nightly, I cannot honestly say I've used it much. FF3 is a mess. It eats lots and lots of cpu while idle and eats memory like a pig and never returns it to the OS. That coupled with that I want the IRC plugin open at all times made me turn to multiple instances. So I needed two browsers, so FF4 it was.
The problem with FF4 is that... that's right, no extensions typically work with it. Always the same with a new version. So I wait until they become compatible.
I hope they can fix some performance issues. Like the new look, though.

Originally Posted by Elysia

I believe it has always been the aim of Firefox to look native on all of its platforms.

I can't say that I've noticed any major differences between Firefox on KDE and Firefox on Windows Explorer... but then, I suppose, there isn't too many ascetic differences between the two WMs anyway. Unless Firefox truly does try to appeal differently to whichever platform its running on rather than stay consistent between platforms, changing the appearance of something like a directory listing might not be expected. Besides the standard menu bar, I haven't really noticed anything native looking about the Firefox browser since its inception. In fact, one might be able to argue that Firefox's original design has changed that way other browsers have come to look and act since. (Though one could not take innovative credit away from browsers such as Opera)

Erm, well, it just so happens that I tend to have Process Explorer running in the background whenever I am using the computer. That way, I can see if something is stealing a lot of CPU power.
Heck, I don't feel secure if I can't see it in the system tray

Also I tend to look at the memory usage periodically as the browser slows down. Basically, the longer it's running, the longer it will take to do stuff like scrolling down a page or typing stuff. Sometimes it just likes to... halt. Annoying.

Originally Posted by Elysia

Also I tend to look at the memory usage periodically as the browser slows down. Basically, the longer it's running, the longer it will take to do stuff like scrolling down a page or typing stuff. Sometimes it just likes to... halt. Annoying.

These days problems like that can be solved for ~$30+S&H.

I also haven't noticed any memory problems whatsoever on FF. Nothing out of the ordinary that is. Since I upgraded to 3 GBs, Firefox has been the least of my concerns. Well, Firefox hasn't been a concern at all.

My two only beefs with FF are this:

- Plugin engine rules are too strict. Major upgrades (and many minor ones) tend to deprecate existing, and usually perfectly valid, plugins. The solution, in case there isn't a plugin available just yet, is to download the latest version of the plugin, open the xpi file in winrar and edit the maxVersion entry inside the install.rdf file to accommodate for the new FF version.

- If network is down, FF takes too long to boot as it waits for the timeout to expire. I'd rather not change this number. Having FF just boot and only then try to connect to the internet would be useful for those of us who may just want to access the local network.

Memory leaks? Resource hogging? I can sympathize if we are talking about a low resource computer. Otherwise don't put them in the same sentence as skins and plugins. If you are so resource conscious, don't use them. Not only they use your oh-so-precious memory, but most memory leaks in FF can be traced right to them.