back to article Firefox 4 debuts: The last kitchen sink release

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4, the latest version of its popular open-source browser, after nearly a year of development. Available for download on Windows, Linux, and Mac, Firefox 4 offers added JavaScript performance through a new extension to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, hardware acceleration on all platforms …

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  1. David 9
    FAIL

    Bug

    I click on a link and don't move the mouse - the page doesn't load.

    I move the mouse - the page loads. Tested on google, bbc news and my own lovely website. I even waited 45seconds for a page to load which usually loads in about 150ms as timed in firebug.

    A bit of a stonker of a bug if it's more than my copy affected!

    1. Robert E A Harvey

      That's queer

      I reported exactly that behaviour in firefox 0.<something> and the bug sorting person said it couldn't possibly do that. I've seen it since, too, in other things like Serif pageplus. Serif say its nothing to do with them, it must be a windows problem.

  2. Fuh Quit

    hmm, I've become fragmented

    I am using IE9 in certain contexts and am now split between Chrome and Fx4 for everything else.

    Ghostery has made it to Chrome which is awesome. NoScripts on Chrome is perhaps stopping me jumping completely from Fx as I feel Fx has become bloated. Fx4 is of course interesting so I am sticking around for a while....

    What I like about Chrome is that I don't have to install Flash to occasionally view a video and that the darn thing updates pretty well without my brain being involved. This is fabulous and definitely the way to go.

    Frankly, speed is not really something I see differing greatly in my experience. Certainly not for what I surf. I rarely reboot and don't tend to often close browsers.....

    If I rate what I prefer to use right now.....

    1. Firefox; if there was one thing to change for them, it would be to stack the plugin icons into a single button somewhere rather than on the nav and status bar. My main PC has only 1024x768 as it's a ThinkPad x61.....more is definitely more for my screen!

    2. Chrome (only just)

    3. IE9 (not far behind but missing things to nuke cookies after session and other plugins)

    4. Safari and Opera I would not bother with. I saw them on the browser ballot thing that Opera kicked and screamed about until MS delivered it....

    btw I have Linux Mint and OSX running at home, they'll get the Fx4 treatment shortly.

    I think I was more excited about IE9.

  3. EddieD

    Not bad, but...

    I tried out the new firefox, and was reasonably impressed - it certainly seemed snappier, and the layout is nice and flexible, but...it killed all the extra navigation buttons on my mouse (except the scroll wheel), and with a bolt, a plate, and arthiritis in my wrist, I need those buttons.

    Reverting to 3.6 was easy, and I'll certainly be going back to give FF4 a more thorough try out as soon as I've scoured the web to (or actually sat down and tried to) find a fix for the mouse problems.

    64bits though? Pretty please?

    1. Greg J Preece

      Really?

      "it killed all the extra navigation buttons on my mouse"

      That's odd, mine work fine. Logitech MX518. Whatcha got?

  4. pinkmouse

    Tried to upgrade...

    And failed. Get message on startup that my system isn't supported. Running OSX10.5.8 on a G5. Went to home page and can't find any system requirements or an alternate download. So it supports XP but not anything older than 10.6 on the Mac? Pointless.

    1. xenny

      No PPC support

      FF 4 supports Intel Macs on 10.5, but has no support for PowerPC CPU'd Macs such as the G5, I suspect because the JavaScript engine is x86 only. :-(

    2. ThomH

      Nope, it's Intel only

      I can't imagine why, given that the codebase doesn't otherwise have Intel dependencies per the evidence of Linux support, but according to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.html it's 10.5 or 10.6, Intel only.

    3. Iain
      Unhappy

      Here

      Found the requirements page:

      http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.html

      So you should be ok wth OS X 10.5?

      But I'm stuffed with my ancient G4 and OS X 10.4

      1. pinkmouse

        Shame

        Ta for that specs page folks, but strange that Intel processor is only recommended, not obligatory.It's a shame they've gone down this route as old Macs do wear much better than the PC equivalents, (please no Mac v PC arguments).

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Better than IE9...

    Only 4MB to download, Lightning fast page rendering and installs & runs on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 - unlike IE9.

    So I won't be bothering with IE9.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Better?

      How do you know it's better if you haven't bothered to try IE9?

      I won't be trying IE9 either (or indeed FF4) because I'm happy with my current browser. Which brings me to what I see as being a very confusing aspect to the browser wars. I meet an awful lot of people who always download every new browser version that comes along and usually declare it to be the best thing since sliced bacon. I have a neighbour who seems to be on a different browser every time I speak to him. He's particularly obsessed with whichever benchmark test the new browser happens to be fastest in. One day he's telling me how fast Safari is, then it's Opera, Chrome, Firefox and occasionally IE. The weird thing is that he doesn't seem to be at all concerned with the experience of using the browser, just which one scored best in benchmark tests.

      He's not as bad as his son who seems to change Linux distro as often as his dad switches browsers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Lovefilm

    Can't play trailers or stream films in Lovefilm. Strangely other flash vids seem fine

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    No different really.

    I let this install last night and it works ok, I didn't really see any major difference in the speed of rendering web pages, but it feels a bit smoother when creating new tabs, 3.6 was quite juddery on some pages or took an eternity to actually open the tab then another two minutes to render the page.

    Two extentions didn't work but this is not the end of the world unlike some people would have us believe. I just uninstalled them and presto FF4 working happily. I was running it alongside Opera and Chrome and quite frankly they all seem to do the same job and do it quite well. FF is going to stay my main browser for now but I regularly have a Chrome browser open doing something else along side.

    I think it was worth the wait.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Apple's holy handheld (which will run Firefox itself)

    I think you missed including the small but very important word NOT in that phrase.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well...

    Looks shiny and *finally* the bookmarks are doing my bidding; but it keeps freezing and releasing on me. It's like being in a fucking stop-motion film.

    May have to defect back to Opera.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the only

    The only reason I use firefox is rikaichan, noscripts and, abp and if you put a bit of effort you can get ff 3.x to be pretty minimal.

    However as long as the plugins keep up, then I'll upgrade.

  11. probedb

    Now uses even more memory!

    Well since upgrading it's eating twice as much memory as it used to :/ I'm sure I must have a bad extension somewhere.

    The plus side is it's so much faster :D

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Clutching at straws

    "But beyond raw speed, we're speeding up the way users flow through the internet. We're speeding up your real online life, improving startup time, tab switching, and scrolling – stuff beyond the benchmarks."

    My real online life (puhlease!) is not spent waiting for tab changes, scrolling or startup. I start my browser only once a day, a matter of a few seconds and hardly significant in terms of a whole day. Switching tabs is so fast as to be barely noticable and certainly not something anybody has to wait for unless their hardware is over ten years old, certainly I've never heard of anybody getting impatient when switching from one tab to another. As for scolling, well can you read faster than your browser can scroll? Course not.

    OK so I will admit that FF3 is incredibly slow to startup when compared to Opera and Chrome, but I've never noticed any browser being slow to switch tabs or scroll. This sounds like the ramblings of a salesman who has little or nothing new and worthwhile in his latest product. People in the motor industry will know the symptoms, if you don't recognise them wait for the next launch of a "facelifted" car. You know the sort of thing it looks a bit different, but is essentially the same car. When the marketing men start telling you about the dynamic styling of the new bumpers or pointing out the additional cup holder in the back you will recognise the same desperation as pointing out a browser's faster scroll speed.

  13. Defiant
    Thumb Down

    Loser

    The BigYin "Oh. Wait. You're using Windows aren't you? Commiserations."

    You Linux guys really need to get get a life. If you are this desperate to get people using Linux then there is something seriously wrong with you

  14. tony72

    I'm late to this party, aren't I?

    On my Atom-powered Windows 7 tablet, Firefox 4 is the only browser that allows smooth flick scrolling of large, media heavy pages; that's really the only instance I've actually noticed the performance improvements, but it's welcome.

    However I really wish that all the effort they've devoted to tab management had gone instead to bookmark management. The bookmark system is still f*%ked, with three separate, and almost equally inadequate, ways of accessing bookmarks (toolbar, sidebar, and menu). The Firefox devs acknowledged this during the planning stages of FF4, but it seems they decided not to do anything about it. Perhaps they think people will stop using bookmarks altogether, and just keep every page they want to reference in the future on an open tab, but that doesn't work for me. I'd love to be able to organize and manipulate bookmarks the way you can work with tabs in the new tab manager, here's hoping something like that happens in the future.

  15. Carl Berry

    Ooo that's annoying

    Right click on link -> second item down "open in new tab". No eh ? what ? why are you opening a new window ? I didn't select that.

    Except I did because they've switched new tab and new window around from 3.x.

    Consistency for usability ? Nah, overrated. :(

  16. F Seiler

    tried it only biefly at work so far

    No big difference so far. Media and JS heavy pages i try to stay away from anyway.

    But the aggregation of "firefox menu button" and tab headers into the title bar seems to cancel out on loading pages (at least some, i din't bother to investigate), leaving the UI with more top-of-the-page overhead (namely an empty toolbar or something) than i had before in the previous versions.

    I tend to customize it so that there is few UI left and this was nicely taken over on the update - until that said canceling out.

    XP by the way, maybe it has something to do with the XP titlebar not friendly to such unexpected customisation :)

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