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Firefox 4 RC now available

blog.mozilla.com

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Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#81

Post by stanleydrew »

taylorbuley wrote: post #4
tshtf wrote: post #3

Serious question here... I now use Chrome, my parents use Chrome, and almost everyone I know has converted. Most HN users seem to use it too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105954 . Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

I'm loving working with IndexedDB. For some reason haven't been able to get my Chrome nightly to play nice with my site but it runs like a charm in FF4. For one, FF uses less vendor prefixes for IndexedDB. I'm not sure if that's my issue but it seems to make FF easier to work with given that when learning IndexedDB there are precious few resources out there aside from the spec.

There is some great discussion and excellent examples of using indexedDB in both Chrome and Firefox in this blog post from Mike West, Google evangelist:

http://mikewest.org/2010/12/intro-to-indexeddb

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#82

Post by malnourish »

robryan wrote: post #12
Alex3917 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually about as fast as Chrome now. Too little too late in my opinion, but at least it's fast enough that it won't actively piss me off when I need a second browser open for some reason.

Yeah, for a while now I have used firefox in kind of I need a quick environment free of cache and cookies to test if what I'm seeing is right.

That's exactly how I used Chrome until just recently. With 'fox's wider adoption (at the time) and my attachment to it, it took a while to switch.

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#83

Post by catshirt »

bkaid wrote: post #80
robryan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for a while now I have used firefox in kind of I need a quick environment free of cache and cookies to test if what I'm seeing is right.

Isn't that the point of Chromes ctrl-shift-T incognito mode?

i wouldn't quite say it's the point...

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#84

Post by BrendanEich »

digitalinfinity wrote: post #38
azakai wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about? Sure! Here are some things I personally find exciting about FF4. I'm not saying everyone should find them exciting, they are just my personal opinion: * FF4 is the only web browser to combine a tracing JIT with a method JIT for JavaScript. Some websites run amazingly fast with that. See the mozilla demos site for examples. * IE9 has great hardware acce…

Sorry- I'm curious- why do you think IE9's JS engine is inferior to FF4/Chrome?

Try any benchmark other than SunSpider.

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#85

Post by drivebyacct2 »

pmh wrote: post #47
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with proprietary tech, but Adobe Flash and Acrobat are unsafe, buggy and drive my CPU mad. After reading your comment, I have once again searched for a setting within Chrome to remove the built-in Flash, but I can't find it. That leaves Chromium and Iron.

I'm not sure that you can remove it, but you should be able to disable it through the about:plugins page. The long way around is through Options->Under the Hood->Plugin-ins->Disable individual plugins.

Even better, turn on "click to enable". It's a blast not having Flash ever run unless I specifically allow it.

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#86

Post by hasenj »

tshtf wrote: post #3

Serious question here... I now use Chrome, my parents use Chrome, and almost everyone I know has converted. Most HN users seem to use it too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105954 . Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

Chrome's support for Arabic is crappy on Linux, so I use Firefox.

Another thing, Firefox4 allows you synthesize audio in Javascript, something that Chrome (AFAIK) can't do yet.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#87

Post by elliottkember »

I'll try it later and edit this comment, but have they changed the way it stores passwords? Currently, without a master password, you can view a user's passwords in plain text.

Ideally, a master password should be a requirement, or passwords should go in the keychain on OSX. Many, many Firefox users do not know about the master password, so if you can sit at their computer you can see their passwords. It's terrifying.

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#88

Post by hsivonen »

tshtf wrote: post #3

Serious question here... I now use Chrome, my parents use Chrome, and almost everyone I know has converted. Most HN users seem to use it too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105954 . Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

Other things were mentioned already, so not to repeat those:

On Ubuntu in particular (but on other Linux distros, too), Firefox 4 has a more platform-appropriate appearance and feel than the other cross-platform major browsers (Chrome and Opera).

For Web authors, there are more polished HTML5 form features to get excited about. For HTML5 feature involves new elements or attributes in markup, the chances of the features present in Firefox being polished is higher than the chances of the features present in Chrome being polished even though it might casually appear from html5test.com that Chrome support a larger number of these features. html5test.com tests if new APIs appear to be present--not if all the default user interaction works right or if the appearance of a feature is pretty across platforms (not just Mac and Windows but Linux, too).

The location bar history search in Firefox is remarkably more useful than in Chrome, because Firefox matches on more things than just the prefix of the URL (though Chrome has better search coming up and already available in about:flags).

Well, actually, syncing browsing history and passwords across browser instances in such a way that the data in encrypted and decrypted on your devices only is well worth repeating although it was mentioned already. (Syncing history and passwords is immensely more useful than just syncing bookmarks or sending over individual URLs, but history and passwords are the most sensitive browser data, so end-to-end crypto between the user's devices is important.)

(Disclosure: I'm consulting for Mozilla. Disclaimer: Speaking only for myself, though.)

Re: Firefox 4 RC now available

#89

Post by asadotzler »

tshtf wrote: post #3

Serious question here... I now use Chrome, my parents use Chrome, and almost everyone I know has converted. Most HN users seem to use it too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105954 . Is there anything compelling in Firefox 4 to get excited about?

It's not as relevant to the audience here, but more than half of the Web still uses Windows XP and Firefox pays much closer attention to making Firefox look and behave appropriately on XP than Chrome or Opera (and Microsoft just gave XP the finger with IE9)
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