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Firefox 4 is here

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Re: Firefox 4 is here

#171

Post by henrikschroder »

stianan wrote: post #126
stianan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

wladimir: Up-sample/filter/down-sample is the standard way of doing it, and any other way will just be an optimization of that transformation.

For graphics, yes, but not for fonts. If you scale text linearly, it just looks bad at smaller sizes, which is why vectorized fonts come with plenty of rendering hints. Add to that subpixel rendering and a lot of other typography rules, and font rendering is suddenly pretty difficult to get right.

Try it yourself, make an image of some text in 80px, shrink it 8 times, and compare that to the same text rendered as 10px. You'll notice that the shrunken image is harder to read than the actual text.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#173

Post by Tomek_ »

Dobbs wrote: post #6
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?

The Tab Candy ( http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/tabcandy/ ) feature is pretty cool. The big thing about Firefox is the Addons: FireBug, NoScript, Adblock Plus, and Pentadactyl (was known as Vimperator) all add up to a fantastic experience. With Firefox 4 I get the fantastic experience with something much closer to Chrome's speed and tab usability. I don't know if I would say Firefox 4 is quite there yet but it is muc…

Maybe it's only me but TabCandy/Panorama feels slow and clumsy, and there's too much mouse clicking/moving involved in operating it (or so it seems after 5 minute of trying it, maybe a matter of getting used to/discovering keyboard shortcuts). I like Opera's solution more (is less revolutionary, and thus easier to adapt to probably). But other than that first impressions are good: feels faster and more responsive (at last!). Maybe I will give it some more tries to see if it will survive a stress test of a normal day-to-day use with tons of tabs opened, etc.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#174

Post by mbrubeck »

huhtenberg wrote: post #66
mbrubeck wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RC2 is bit-for-bit identical to the final release - we did not make any changes after RC2. You can right-click the reload button and choose "Customize" and drag it to a different location if you want. (It will become a full-sized button.) You can actually rearrange/remove/add any of the toolbar items this way.

Thanks for the hint. FF3 had a problem with gradually slowing down to a crawl. Clicking on the link would take few seconds to register, switching between tabs or from another app to FF would also cause FF to appear frozen for several seconds, etc. Submitted a ticket regarding this, got multiple follow-up comments from other users, but never from a dev. I realize you have a volume to deal with, but on my end it looks…

You might want to try running in a fresh profile, to see if anything in your old profile is causing the problem: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/

Sorry about your unanswered bug - it's pretty hard for us to address general performance bugs that don't have specific steps to reproduce. We have to focus on fixing what we can see or measure, and hope that it fixes what users are seeing too.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#175

Post by mkr-hn »

pldpld wrote: post #106
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.

View->Toolbars->Menu Bar

That gives you an Opera-style widget on the left side for menu functions and moves tabs to the top.

edit: And Alt will bring the normal menu into view if you need something not on the widget.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#176

Post by kristiandupont »

To everybody asking what Firefox has that Chrome lacks: The Awesomebar.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but it's by far the thing I miss the most from FF (along with FireBug and TreeStyle Tabs). It practically replaces bookmarks for me because because it searches through the history. In Chrome it feels like I have to re-google everything unless I remember the exact url.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#177

Post by mbrubeck »

csel wrote: post #165
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?

For me, search on the address bar is the most important feature that I love about Chrome. IE9 has the same thing now. I am not sure why Firefox 4 did not put search on the address bar. So for a Chrome user, you will greatly miss that feature. :( Until FF integrates that, I am back to using Chrome.

You can search from the address bar in Firefox 4, but you won't get search suggestions as you type. If you want to change this, try: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/omnibar/

(And you can use the "Customize toolbars" window to remove the search bar if you want.)

Firefox intentionally does not show suggestions in the address bar by default, because we don't want to send everything you type there to a third party.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#178

Post by Pyrodogg »

pldpld wrote: post #106
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.

Maximize the window AND disable the menu bar. If you don't disable the menu bar, you don't see the Firefox menu or the tabs in the title bar space.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#179

Post by starwed »

eftpotrm wrote: post #109
Iris wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ctrl+k has always worked, it is not new. (And as long as I can remember has been the "primary" short-cut.) They wanted Ctrl+e to be available for tab group functionality: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592183

We can kill old keyboard shortcuts. There are two for focusing the search box (ctrl/cmd + e, ctrl/cmd + k) and technically only one is needed. Many of these things are here for legacy reasons supporting users of IE5 and Netscape 3. That can, thankfully, go away.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#180

Post by yuhong »

hasenj wrote: post #90
DarkShikari wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan still uses Shift-JIS for practically everything, much to the chagrin of anyone else in the world looking to use their applications.

I visit some Japanese websites from time to time (not that I can read or anything .. just clicking on links) and don't remember having many problems with weird characters.

This is because this is required if the site uses a legacy character encoding AND it is declared incorrectly or not at all.
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