Firefox 4 is here • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#201

Post by bilban » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:22 PM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #154

pldpld wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like having a title bar, I park collapsed Trillian chat windows up there and I HATE that Chrome doesn't give me space to do that. It's a UI deal breaker for Chrome for me.

It's indeed odd.

The 'title' is the meta element, that is incredibly useful! It deserves attention. Not to be lost.

That's not to say tat I don't like slim tool bars.

I also prefer uniformity across the desktop and this feels like a deviation. Much in the way that a tabbing interface was alien when opera introduced it.

I like tabs, but I'd rather my window manager work with them. But that's just me.

I'm running minefield, and I've noticed some issues in Gmail, with dragging selected text - I think the browser assumes I'm dragging and dropping. Firefox still doesn't squeeze the tab size to fit the window width, which irritates the hell out of me.

Having said that there doesn't seem to be a radical UI overhaul - which is a shame.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#202

Post by barrkel » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:25 PM UTC

Text rendering in Windows is significantly worse - sometimes it's blotchy (random characters seem to have more weight than others) - particularly here on HN, and inter-character spacing is inconsistent; at others, the anti-aliasing looks overdone, and text looks blurry and over-smoothed.

I had Firefox 3 configured such that the main menu, URL box, navigation buttons etc. were all on the same toolbar - the menu bar. In that same configuration, Firefox 4 looks somewhat ugly - there's little space between the bottom of the menu bar and the page content (I also use tree-style tabs).

Apart from how it looks, and how it renders text, it's nice. The resizable gripper on multi-line text boxes is nice - that works well here on HN.

Edit: after disabling hardware acceleration, the text at least is much nicer. I don't notice any loss in performance in simple scrolling etc. with it disabled either.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#203

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:29 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #118

pldpld wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On my little netbook this is a deal-breaker. It wastes about 1/10 of the screen.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#204

Post by bilban » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:29 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #118

pldpld wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On my little netbook this is a deal-breaker. It wastes about 1/10 of the screen.

I assume you mean you'd rather the title bar wasn't there - for your net book. Which is a fair comment.

I guess you could run the browser in full screen mode. Though full screen doesn't suit everyone.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#205

Post by mziulu » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:29 PM UTC

sid0 wrote: post #71

mziulu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do - kind of. Since I don't have Firefox set to reopen the last batch of tabs I had opened the last time I was using it, Panorama is kind of useless in my case, since I would mainly use it to keep tabs grouped by content, and it would be a chore to redo the grouping at each restart. Still, it comes in handy to keep reddit/hn on one group and work related stuff on another groups and quickly switch between the two by…

Session restore saves your tab groups.

Mmh yeah, I should have specified that I specifically set ff up to not restore tabs on startup!

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#206

Post by hasenj » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:30 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #125

SeanDav wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I am a Firefox Fanboi At work I can only use Firefox or IE so no brainer there - I use Firefox. At home I use Firefox but generally have Chrome open to play the odd Facebook game. The thing that puzzles me is I really don't notice any difference in performance between Chrome and Firefox and never have. I have a 4mb internet connection at the moment but noticed nothing different when I had 8. The only reas…

If flash crashes, it only crashes out one tab. That's the killer feature for me with chrome.

In firefox, if flash crashes, it doesn't crash any tab; just the flash element (e.g. the youtube video box becomes gray)

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#207

Post by Mafana0 » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:31 PM UTC

Count me impressed. I use netbooks a lot and FF4 gave me the best browsing experience I've ever tried on a 10"-screen, Atom-CPU powered PC. Performance improvements and the amount of space it saves on a small screen for my usage are pretty amazing. Kudos Mozilla for another great release!

EDIT: Just noticed that FF4 allows me to resize text-fields that render quite small because of the small screen. Small, relative-sized text-fields can be easily resized to a convenient size.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#208

Post by jcastro » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:33 PM UTC

ch0wn wrote: post #151

I couldn't find any PPAs or packages for Ubuntu, yet. Did anyone else?

It's in the firefox-stable PPA now for 10.04 and 10.10:

Instructions here: http://askubuntu.com/q/6339/235

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#209

Post by falcolas » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:34 PM UTC

IChrisI wrote: post #190

kristiandupont wrote: post #176

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.

Personally, I like Chrome's address bar better than Firefox 4's. In Chrome, I can type g-m- to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m- - . It's a little thing, but it makes a difference to me. Can't live without Tree Style Tabs though. Firefox is my "heavy lifting" browser.

You can use tab instead of the down arrow - pretty much identical to tab completion in the linux command line.

Re: Firefox 4 is here

#210

Post by rhizome » Tue, Mar 22, 2011, 5:35 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #176

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.

This is a good point that I've only noticed recently. Address bar completion in Chrome is much much worse than in Firefox.