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Firefox 4 is here

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Re: Firefox 4 is here

#101

Post by philikon »

rufugee wrote: post #79
eftpotrm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious; in what way do you prefer Chrome's tab handling? For me it's one of the worst things about Chrome; this window currently has ten tabs open and that's at the _very_ low end for me. With Firefox I can see what I've got open no matter how many I've got because of the pop-down list and the scrolling bar, while Chrome just mashes the list into invisibility.

Here here. Chrome's tab handling is a nightmare. I hope FF4 will give me a reason to switch back and get access to what should be simple things (vertical tab lists) but appear to be difficult to provide in Chrome.

For a fast and simple vertical tabs implementation, see https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#102

Post by wladimir »

stianan wrote: post #64
henrikschroder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disabling hardware acceleration worked for me. I'm on Windows 7, and now, with it disabled, it looks like Cleartype is working as it should. With hardware acceleration enabled, it looks like Cleartype isn't working, but Firefox doing its own anti-aliasing, and doing a worse job of it. Does that sound reasonable?

I don't understand why getting anti-aliasing right is so hard. Just render text a few times bigger, use some kind of low-pass filter (box filter will do) and down-sample it. It's what every graphics program does. That would put an end to using Photoshop or Flash for headlines just to make them look decent.

Because that's a very CPU and memory inefficient way of doing it. If you value performance, you don't want to render something "a few times bigger" filter it and then scale it down. You want to render the text and anti-alias it at the same time. And that's not a trivial thing.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#103

Post by seabee »

rufugee wrote: post #73
famousactress wrote: post #31

I've been on the FF4 beta for some time (the web app we work on is currently only supported on firefox). My honest assessment? FF4 is a huge improvement over FF3, specifically in terms of performance. It's still not Chrome though. Firebug works great in it (better than it does in FF3). So yeah, if you've been using FF3 for web-dev or to browse, you're about to get a major upgrade. If you're a Chrome user I don't know…

I don't know about you, but using Chrome has always given me this unsettling feeling that somewhere in Google's server farm, a machine is collecting everything I do and linking it to my other activity (gmail, gdocs, etc). It might now actually be going on, but it's hard for me to trust that it's not. I just don't like giving a behemoth like Google access to my complete internet history, even though the most harmful t…

Isn't that what Chromium is for?

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#104

Post by cryptoz »

rufugee wrote: post #73
famousactress wrote: post #31

I've been on the FF4 beta for some time (the web app we work on is currently only supported on firefox). My honest assessment? FF4 is a huge improvement over FF3, specifically in terms of performance. It's still not Chrome though. Firebug works great in it (better than it does in FF3). So yeah, if you've been using FF3 for web-dev or to browse, you're about to get a major upgrade. If you're a Chrome user I don't know…

I don't know about you, but using Chrome has always given me this unsettling feeling that somewhere in Google's server farm, a machine is collecting everything I do and linking it to my other activity (gmail, gdocs, etc). It might now actually be going on, but it's hard for me to trust that it's not. I just don't like giving a behemoth like Google access to my complete internet history, even though the most harmful t…

> It might now actually be going on, but it's hard for me to trust that it's not.

Run Chromium. It's fully open source. You can see for yourself that nothing scary is being sent to Google. The same can't be said for Chrome since the source is closed, but there's basically zero difference between the two. The icon is a bit less colorful I guess.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#105

Post by madelfio »

DarkShikari wrote: post #33

The new "menu in the upper left" seems to be rather badly designed. It's missing the "View" menu entirely, which makes it impossible for me to view non-ASCII/Unicode websites. It took me about 5 minutes of searching and frantically right-clicking to re-enable the old menu, which of course still had the View menu. On a positive note, 4 is so much faster than 3.6 it isn't even funny. It's like going from a 286 running…

Tap "Alt" and you get the normal menus (including "View"). Not very obvious, but easy once you know.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#106

Post by pldpld »

giu wrote: post #38

I started using Firefox again the day I heard about the 4.0 Release Candidate, and thought I could give it a another try after it failed to convince me the few times I tried to use it in the past. I was pleasently surprised. The browser's way faster; launching it doesn't take that much time; the UI is way more responsive; and all the add-ons I've been using in the past are compatible with 4.0 (Web Developer, Firebug,…

Why is title bar there? I was hoping they'd push the tabs up into the title bar like Chrome and give us more screen space.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#107

Post by ootachi »

d0m wrote: post #2

Lets say I'm a chrome user (and loving it), is Firefox4 worth a try? What are the main differences from the last version?

IMHO the biggest thing that Firefox 4 has over Chrome is graphics acceleration via Direct2D on Windows and GL retained layers on the Mac. Chrome has neither in stable builds. Graphics acceleration helps scrolling performance in particular and is what allows things like the Panorama zoom animation to look smooth.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#108

Post by RossM »

trezor wrote: post #63
RossM wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different (Chrome-inspired) UI; faster (rendering speed) compared to previous versions and some techy-things like hardware acceleration. They also have synchronisation built-in now. I'm also a Chrome user but I'd quite like to switch back if they've sorted out the chronic lag issues I've always had. Update: In ff4 now, looks and feels great, if a little sluggish with page scrolling. I don't know, Chrome just feels sl…

Different (Chrome-inspired) UI I would say it is a carbon-copy of Opera, but that's just me: http://imgur.com/IzVxJ

Wow, that's strikingly similar, I had no idea (I don't use Opera).

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#109

Post by eftpotrm »

Iris wrote: post #99
eftpotrm wrote: post #65

I'm hopeful for the speed improvements; I was having issues with 3.6.x in that and so far 4 seems good but I've not really stressed it. Otherwise, confess first impressions are less happy. Moving the tab bar has left it stranded adjacent to neither the edge of the window nor the page which makes it less easy to quickly grab sight of for me, and I seem to have lost the shortcut for the search box which I actually _use…

Ctrl-K seems to work for selecting the search bar in the v.4.0.

Thanks; I wonder why they changed it but didn't put a tooltip on the component advertising the new shortcut? I'm sure that used to be there on at least some older versions of Firefox.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#110

Post by henrikschroder »

stianan wrote: post #64
henrikschroder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disabling hardware acceleration worked for me. I'm on Windows 7, and now, with it disabled, it looks like Cleartype is working as it should. With hardware acceleration enabled, it looks like Cleartype isn't working, but Firefox doing its own anti-aliasing, and doing a worse job of it. Does that sound reasonable?

I don't understand why getting anti-aliasing right is so hard. Just render text a few times bigger, use some kind of low-pass filter (box filter will do) and down-sample it. It's what every graphics program does. That would put an end to using Photoshop or Flash for headlines just to make them look decent.

Cleartype uses subpixel rendering as well, I'm not so sure you can achieve that by simply down-sampling a larger render.
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