Firefox 4.0 has been a long time and for those who might not have been following its development could probably be forgiven for thinking that things have gone into a bit of a holding pattern recently. Thankfully, a beta release has emerged from Mozilla and I’ve taken a quick look at it.
Firefox 4 (New Toolbar)
What you will notice is that the toolbar arrangement has undergone a significant change (at least in the Windows version at this point in time). The traditional worded menu across the top of the window is gone and mimics a layout similar to Google Chrome. The other thing you might notice is that the tabs are now above the address bar (another similarity to Google’s browser). Careful thought has been given to this change to the default setting from a user interface perspective, primarily because the address bar is unique to each tab (i.e. it contains the URL opened in each tab). However, if you like the old way of doing things, you can change it back in the Firefox menu.
There have also been a raft of other tweaks under the hood including improved JavaScript performance as well as support for hardware accelerated webpage rendering which will be good news for those of us with respectable video cards.
Of course, beta releases can also come with some bugs and Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 is no exception. As you can see, I am using a “persona” (a fancy word for the background in the toolbar). An unfortunate side effect of using a persona in this beta release is that the minimise, maximise and close buttons you would expect to see in the top-right corner are not present. Also, your add-ons may or may not work with the beta release until they are updated to be compatible with this new major release.
At this stage, I would not recommend that you use it as your default browser on a critical computer. There are kinks still to be worked out and you might find yourself caught short when you really need to do something important. If you are wanting to have a muck around with it to see how it performs, you can download it from here.
2 comments
Sigh. I am still so unimpressed with Mozilla and their progression with Firefox these days. Back in the day, Firefox was my browser of choice and was doing great things with web browser technology, often being ahead of the curve. It certainly made a great alternative to a terrible native browser provided with Windows – Internet Explorer. And don’t get me wrong, it still is a great alternative over IE.
My disappointment comes from Firefox gradually becoming more of a resource hog than it used to be, more bloated for no particular reason and features don’t seem to be keeping up. Only now are we seeing Firefox sporting some of the great looks and features that Google Chrome has been boasting for some time. It’s a shame to have left Firefox behind but to be honest, it’s going to take quite a lot for me to step away from Google’s clutches now.
It’s just a shame that Google Chrome cannot be installed on work systems.
Author
I guess there is a trade off between a community developed or open source project and something that is closed source. Memory bloat was an issue that was supposed to be addressed in Firefox 2 but frequently I have had Firefox processes running into hundreds of megabytes.
It does seem that Firefox is playing catch up though. Chrome already has its tabs run in separate processes (which helps to isolate crashes) whilst Firefox has only just introduced this functionality in 3.6.x. Chrome’s plug-in functionality also steals some of the thunder from Firefox.
I guess the real question is what is next?