View Full Version : Firefox 4
Well its out & there is no thread :???:
I've switched to it (yay, Adblock!) having been using Chrome lately due to FF 3.6 & the FF 4 betas being unstable at least with the number of tabs I use.
Of course, I've been using far fewer tabs in Chrome so probably would have been OK if I'd managed to trim down some of those tabs...
Anyway, its been pretty solid for me so-far. No crashes at all.
Only real problem I've had is a few times when closing several tabs in a row quickly it seems to loose track of one, leaving the tab on tab bar but un-clickable.
Goes away after restarting the browser.
For me a nice change is it doesn't auto-reload all your tabs on starting the browser, others with less tabs/faster connections may not like that so much though.
Tab Groups are sweet, though the interface seems to be pretty laggy for me both at home with lots of tabs & with the crappy work PC.
Tabs on top is somehow more of a PITA than in Chrome but they do have an option to put them back.
Hmm, just discovered if you disable Menu bar it goes more Chrome with tabs in title bar = takes less vertical space which is better.
Gonna try this out for a while.
App Tab pinning gives you a permanently open tab available on all tab groups.
For me I've just got Wikipedia there at the moment though.
Most other stuff is split out into topic based groups.
Might have some better use for it at work though.
Albuquerque
25-Mar-2011, 20:38
Just as an aside, you do know that Adblock has been available for Chrome for quite some time, right? As is NoScript and the like...
Almost every browser (probably every?) has automatically loading your previously used tabs back as an option. FF4 is a new install probably and for some reason has it off currently, when you previously had the option enabled I presume.
Seems to slightly blur everything with a AA filter. Not sure if I like the effect or not. Really noticeable on the menu at the top of Beyond3D main page.
Seems to slightly blur everything with a AA filter. Not sure if I like the effect or not. Really noticeable on the menu at the top of Beyond3D main page.
Try turning off hardware acceleration. It's in the Advanced > General tab.
Its not failing to load the tabs, just it fills the tabs with the local cached version rather than reloading the latest version of the net.
This is good for my data cap & bandwidth. With unlimited data & better connection speed I'd probably be annoyed.
you do know that Adblock has been available for Chrome for quite some timeActually no :oops:
Last time I looked (quite a while back) it wasn't & I guess I presumed Google was denying it.
Try turning off hardware acceleration. It's in the Advanced > General tab.
That was it, thanks. All the fonts look normal now as well. Whilst I'd rather have hardware acceleration on, it shouldn't blur everything so much.
That was it, thanks. All the fonts look normal now as well. Whilst I'd rather have hardware acceleration on, it shouldn't blur everything so much.
I cannot agree enough with this. I don't know what they're doing to the fonts, but it's annoying as hell.
I cannot agree enough with this. I don't know what they're doing to the fonts, but it's annoying as hell.
You haven't perchance configured some kind of fixed AA in your graphics driver, have you?
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
26-Mar-2011, 13:58
It's the morphological AA set in CCC. It must be seeing FF4 as a 3D app and applying AA to the whole window, including all the text - something it's particularly bad at doing well.
I don't have MLAA, or any AA forced on though, everything in my CCC is app default.
I believe they would have to work with AMD on making sure the DirectDrive acceleration renders the fonts properly. For the moment I'm leaving it off.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
26-Mar-2011, 14:31
I don't have MLAA, or any AA forced on though, everything in my CCC is app default.
I believe they would have to work with AMD on making sure the DirectDrive acceleration renders the fonts properly. For the moment I'm leaving it off.
That's weird, because everything works fine for me until I enable morphological in the CCC, and then the text gets blurry. As soon as I disable MLAA, everything goes back to normal. I guess AMD need to have a app profile that disables MLAA for Firefox 4.
That's weird, because everything works fine for me until I enable morphological in the CCC, and then the text gets blurry. As soon as I disable MLAA, everything goes back to normal. I guess AMD need to have a app profile that disables MLAA for Firefox 4.
What Cat version are you using? I'm on 11.2 atm.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
26-Mar-2011, 16:35
What Cat version are you using? I'm on 11.2 atm.
11.4 Preview.
I haven't seen the blur myself. I've used FF4 on a couple of modern Radeons , GeForce GTX 560 and 6150, and my Intel GMA 900 EeePC. I did notice that the fonts look a little different in both FF4 and IE9 compared to IE8 and FF3.x. I'm assuming font rendering has been changed with the new browsers. Safari also has its own font rendering look.
The EeePC is on XP and I'm sure it doesn't support the hardware acceleration so I think the fonts look like FF3.5.
I think FF4 is excellent. It is noticeably faster than FF3.x on the Eee and I get to keep my autohiding bookmarks sidebar and the best fullscreen mode out there. Otherwise I'd have moved to Chrome, but FF4 feels as fast as Chrome to me.
Blazkowicz
26-Mar-2011, 23:01
I've used Seamonkey 2.1 beta on a few computers, including a slow one (celeron at 600MHz). it's Firefox 4 with a old-style GUI, really good. (unless for the flash blocking extension not working)
I ran firefox 4 RC on the old machine too, ubuntu 10.10 but not the default desktop, I was confused at the looks - it didn't look like the windows version, which is a clone of Opera.
not too much bothered I will use either browser depending on the mood or situation :)
You haven't perchance configured some kind of fixed AA in your graphics driver, have you?
Just checked, and I do not.
Babel-17
27-Mar-2011, 02:37
MozBackup 1.5 is here with some bugfixes and with support of Firefox 4.0. http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
MozBackup is a simple utility for creating backups of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, Flock, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite, Spicebird, Songbird and Netscape profiles.
It allows you to backup and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, passwords, cache etc. It's an easy way to do Firefox backup, Thunderbird backup ...
Starting to appreciate Firefox 4.0 more and more. It's a genuine speed-boost, with all the other advantages (almost flawless compatibility, where Opera/Chrome sometimes still have issues with some of our company sites).
But what I do really miss is the start-page. I can't find out how to set your new Tab window to show something like the frequently visited tiles you have in Opera, Chrome and Safari (and now also IE9 I think, but I can't run that on this laptop)
Blazkowicz
29-Mar-2011, 03:13
I'm liking it more as well :lol2:
it's excellent for > 10 year old computers as well as a lightweight VM.
replacing the status bar with a tooltip on the bottom when mousing over a link is an excellent change.
about the linux weirdness, I've found out that the menu bar is enabled by default (good thing as far as I'm concerned) and then the looks vary a lot because they're tied to the gtk theme.
here ff4 looking very plain, but very clean :
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/4365/screenshot201103290403.png
using 131MB with eight tabs, which is decent enough.
djskribbles
29-Mar-2011, 05:36
this is how I have mine.
http://img34.imageshack.us/f/68359086.png/
I didn't like FF4 initially, but it's growing on me. The only reason why I didn't like it, was because I've always had FF setup a certain way and FF4 forced me to reconfigure my top bars. After some configuration, it's pretty much how I had it before, but it takes up less space now with the new tab system and the fact that I can remove the bottom status bar because of the popup when you hover over a link. I have a flash downloader add-on that was in the status bar at the bottom, but FF4 lets me move that icon wherever I want, so I have it in the top right.
Yeah I tried that but need the menu too often so I had more of a fiddle with customisation & came up with this:
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8055/ff4c.jpg (http://img854.imageshack.us/i/ff4c.jpg/)
Edit: Since I just noticed, is now minus the Homepage icon.
djskribbles
29-Mar-2011, 10:18
I used to put everything in the menu bar too, but in FF4, it makes that area semi-translucent because of the aero theme and a bit smaller. On my HTPC, it's a bit difficult to see, so I'm forced to use the navigation bar. I hardly use the menu bar anyway; the only thing I really used in the menu bar, was bookmarks, but I added a bookmark icon in the nav. bar.
With tabs on top, it puts them beside the orange firefox dropdown box so it barely takes up any space. Then by removing the status bar at the bottom, it gives me quite a bit more room.
Silent_Buddha
29-Mar-2011, 19:54
Hmmm, with the ability to put tabs on bottom (yay) it looks like you could make the UI look like IE 7/8. I may have to give that a try as IE 7/8 had the best browser UI I've ever used. Such a shame that IE 9 has such a horrible UI.
Regards,
SB
infinity4
29-Mar-2011, 20:22
Tried and now converted. Only concern I have with FF4 is memory problems...
Hmmm, with the ability to put tabs on bottom (yay) it looks like you could make the UI look like IE 7/8. I may have to give that a try as IE 7/8 had the best browser UI I've ever used. Such a shame that IE 9 has such a horrible UI.
Regards,
SB
It is getting worse from each IE iteration, although I think IE8 I liked a lot. But not really surprising given it is MS product :twisted:
Blazkowicz
29-Mar-2011, 20:52
I thought IE5/6 UI was excellent, only lacking tabs (hell win95 was full of tabs in control panels already).
it was really great having a lightweight fast browser, best-in-class file manager (in win 9x/2000) and seamless ftp client as a same program that turns into one of its avatars when you hit ALT-D and typed shit in the address bar.
lack of security and tabs killed it, and I switched from IE5 to Firefox 0.5
IE7 was about 6 or 7 years late and looked like some Windows Media Player 7 and lost all the point.
mrcorbo
29-Mar-2011, 20:58
I've been on Chrome for quite a while now and one thing I love about Chrome that I hated about Firefox that new releases don't break extensions. Since I've been using Chrome, even with bleeding edge betas, I have never had an extension stop working when I upgraded. Is this issue still present with Firefox?
Blazkowicz
29-Mar-2011, 21:10
most certainly, yes.
but mozilla is pushing for a new extensions system called "Jetpack", based on javascript, css stuff etc.
this is similar, or the same thing as the Chrome's extensions, so they are likely not to break and maybe not to require a restart.
It caused a flaming drama on slashdot back then but I believe both kinds of extensions will coexist.
mrcorbo
29-Mar-2011, 21:31
most certainly, yes.
but mozilla is pushing for a new extensions system called "Jetpack", based on javascript, css stuff etc.
this is similar, or the same thing as the Chrome's extensions, so they are likely not to break and maybe not to require a restart.
It caused a flaming drama on slashdot back then but I believe both kinds of extensions will coexist.
OK, thanks.
Otto Dafe
29-Mar-2011, 22:43
I've been on Chrome for quite a while now and one thing I love about Chrome that I hated about Firefox that new releases don't break extensions. Since I've been using Chrome, even with bleeding edge betas, I have never had an extension stop working when I upgraded. Is this issue still present with Firefox?
Not in this particular case, since FF4 was in beta for what, a year? Since Mozilla is now refocusing to do many smaller, incremental updates, well...I guess that could go either way with regard to extensions. In any case, it seems like we're nearing a browser singularity point, whereafter you could randomly open any browser and not be able to tell the difference :wink:.
By the way, is anyone getting crazy flash player 10 crashes in FF4? I got one that ramped up my CPU/GPU clocks to max, I had to logout of windows to get things back to normal.
the only thing I really used in the menu bar, was bookmarks, but I added a bookmark icon in the nav. barOh, duh :oops: also Undo Close button to make it a deal for me.
Oh, duh :oops: also Undo Close button to make it a deal for me.
Right-click a tab and select undo close tab.
Yeah I know about that but fairly often its not the last closed tab I want back so I need the recently closed tabs list.
Yeah I know about that but fairly often its not the last closed tab I want back so I need the recently closed tabs list.
Ah, yes. That's fine. You could just undo a lot of tabs, but the list is very nice to have in some circumstances.
Babel-17
30-Mar-2011, 13:31
For Recently Closed Tabs, click History, on the Menu Bar.
For Recently Closed Tabs, click History, on the Menu Bar.
Yes, we know.
Silent_Buddha
30-Mar-2011, 18:57
I've been on Chrome for quite a while now and one thing I love about Chrome that I hated about Firefox that new releases don't break extensions. Since I've been using Chrome, even with bleeding edge betas, I have never had an extension stop working when I upgraded. Is this issue still present with Firefox?
Hmmm, is that a big problem on FF? I mean does it happen often? If so...
most certainly, yes.
but mozilla is pushing for a new extensions system called "Jetpack", based on javascript, css stuff etc.
this is similar, or the same thing as the Chrome's extensions, so they are likely not to break and maybe not to require a restart.
It caused a flaming drama on slashdot back then but I believe both kinds of extensions will coexist.
Maybe I'll wait until this "Jetpack" system becomes more entrenched before I give FF a try again. I think last time I used it was back in 2003 or 2004.
Regards,
SB
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