
Firefox 4 is here - potomak
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/
======
giu
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,
Colorzilla, etc.).

I'm currently using it as my primary browser _again_ , and it looks like it
will stay on that podest for awhile.

It's awesome to see a browser _resurecting_ with that many improvements,
despite the fact that some people have almost written it off due to some
annoying issues in past versions, the most prominent one being performance.

I'd really recommend you to give it a try.

Disclaimer: I've been using Opera 11 as my primary browser before I decided to
give FF 4.0 a try

~~~
pldpld
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.

~~~
gcr
Maximize. It puts the tabs in the title bar when you maximize.

~~~
niels_olson
Where is this "maximize"? Is it an add-on? A button I'm not seeing?

edit: why the downvotes? I'm at work on my rickety WinXP corporate box, and
FF4 definitely does not behave as described above. (Do really think I didn't
try that?!)

~~~
sid0
Maximize as in what your OS allows you to do.

edit: Oh, Windows XP. You'll have to disable the menu bar to get it to work
there, I think.

~~~
niels_olson
check. That works, thanks!

------
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.

~~~
IChrisI
Personally, I like Chrome's address bar better than Firefox 4's. In Chrome, I
can type g-m-<enter> to go to Gmail. In Firefox, it's g-m-<down>-<enter>. 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.

~~~
DEinspanjer
I greatly prefer being able to hit enter on the first result too. Here is the
addon I use to enable that: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-prospector-speak-/)

~~~
bad_user
You don't need an addon -- the option is in about:config.

~~~
waterhouse
Specifically, browser.urlbar.autoFill. (Found that out just now.)

------
bad_user
I have been using Chrome for 6 months now.

What I liked about Chrome: optimized usage of vertical space and speed. But
what I really disliked about it -- Chrome add-ons are useless. Chrome would
never allow something like Firebug without being built-in. And I couldn't find
a plugin with proper Delicious integration either.

Also, searching the history in the address bar works a lot better in Firefox
-- probably has something to do with the way Chrome encourages you to use
Google. And speaking of History -- Chrome still doesn't let you search and
delete items in the search results page. What's up with that?

Now Firefox 4 has it all -- the interface is still not as vertical-space
efficient as in Chrome, but as I understand it on Windows tabs do move in the
title bar, and that little change is coming for Linux too.

I love Firefox 4. They did an awesome job.

~~~
mushtar
Why do you say that Firefox 4 is not as vertical-space efficient as Chrome?

Right click on your tabs, and select 'Tabs on top'. Right click on the Menu
bar and uncheck 'Menu bar'. Done--looks like Chrome!

~~~
rorrr
No, it doesn't look like Chrome. There's still a title bar that Chrome hides
in the maximized mode.

~~~
gimpf
It works without problems on WinXP, there is no difference; throughout the
beta-versions Firefox incrementally used some minor tweaks of Chrome (for
instance, where the link-bar on mouse-hover or the status-information on
loading the web-page was displayed). Sad to hear that it does not work on all
OSs -- for me it is one of the most important improvements.

------
famousactress
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 of anything that
would make FF4 especially attractive.

~~~
rufugee
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 thing it could collect on me is how many
HN tabs I have open during the work day.

~~~
cryptoz
> 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.

~~~
dstein
Has anyone actually done any research into exactly what data is sent to Google
when you use Chrome?

Not that it really matters anymore, FF4 is faster than Chrome in my
experiments so don't think I'll be using Chrome at all anymore.

~~~
bilban
You want to talk to the SRWare Iron team.

~~~
azakai
Why would you trust the "SRWare Iron team", whoever they are, at all?

And why would you trust them more than you would trust Google?

~~~
bilban
I didn't say anything about trust.

It was merely a suggestion to look at Iron or talk to the developers as they
promote their product as an alternative to Chrome along the lines of privacy.
You'd think they'd be in a good position to point out the differences.

------
d0m
Lets say I'm a chrome user (and loving it), is Firefox4 worth a try? What are
the main differences from the last version?

~~~
mbrubeck
* Faster startup, more responsive, faster JavaScript with the new Jaegermonkey JIT.

* New, less cluttered UI.

* Built-in sync of bookmarks/tabs/history/passwords, _fully encrypted on the client_ (unlike Chrome's sync which encrypts passwords only).

* Sync your bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and form data to Firefox for Android!

See also this thread for answers from various members of the Firefox team:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g197r/iama_were_on_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g197r/iama_were_on_the_firefox_development_team_and/c1k6dex)

~~~
bretthoerner
But aren't those all features of Chrome? Wouldn't a happy Chrome user want to
know about something FF4 does that Chrome doesn't?

It's very clear that 4 > 3.6, the features you listed are awesome ... they
just aren't very appealing to a current Chrome user.

~~~
mbrubeck
I was answering the question from above "what are the differences from the
current version?"

As for the differences from Chrome, those are mostly the same as they've
always been: Deeper extensibility, more customization points, and made by a
non-profit organization dedicated to openness.

~~~
51Cards
Most customization points is the big win for me. I REALLY like to alter my
browsers to fit my preferred layout and FF has done quite well at maintaining
that capability for me. I get into Chrome and I find myself constantly going
"Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... Oh,
there's no option for that... " to the point I close it in frustration yet
again.

~~~
technomancy
Absolutely. You would never be able to do something like <http://conkeror.org>
in Chrome. At one point I tried to change some key bindings in Chrome, and I
had to spend 2 hours recompiling the whole thing; it was an absolute
nightmare.

~~~
zacharypinter
In fairness, isn't Conkeror more of a fork of Firefox than an extension
(though I believe it started as an extension)?

~~~
technomancy
Not quite. Mozilla is a platform with which you can build apps. Firefox is by
far the most popular app running on the Mozilla platform, but there are many
others, including SongBird, Thunderbird, etc. The bare executable for the
Mozilla platform is Xulrunner, and that's what Conkeror uses.

Anyway, the one thing that keeps Firefox competitive is that they built a
platform in a fast yet very awkward language, then they built an application
on top of that using a much more pleasant, flexible language. None of the
other browser vendors understand this; Chrome devs parrot the "but Javascript
is too slow to build our UI in" even though they have the fastest JS engine in
the world. It boggles the mind and cripples them in the long term for anything
other than your standard point-n-grunt interfaces.

------
DarkShikari
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 off of an 8-inch floppy to a Core 2 on an SSD.

~~~
mbrubeck
Character encoding options are now in the "Web Developer" sub-menu of the
Firefox menu. (Weird, I know.)

 _UPDATE:_ This is different in localized builds - Japanese builds of Firefox
should provide easier access to the encoding menu. In other locales, you can
go to about:config and toggle "browser.menu.showCharacterEncoding" to see
this.

You can also press Alt+V to quickly open the old View menu.

~~~
DarkShikari
This may confuse the few hundred million users whose languages don't use Roman
letters and weren't told about this move...

~~~
hasenj
I'm a user of such a language (Arabic) and by now all websites I care about
use utf8, so the character encoding is a problem from the past as far as I'm
concerned.

I'd be really surprised if there are still sites that don't use utf8.

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

~~~
hasenj
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.

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

------
gue5t
Firefox 4 still has a huge number of UI issues on linux due to reliance on XUL
for the UI. There have been improvements in a couple extensions, as far as
font colors using GTK themes go, but the menubar is still too tall and has the
wrong font color (on basically every GTK theme and theme engine I can find)
and keyboard shortcuts for several things (e.g. space to toggle menu items
without closing the menu) are removed from GTK. Using RGBA with the murrine
GTK engine, alpha transparency leaves "ghosts" on hovered menu options in
Firefox, and buttons occasionally completely change their look pre- and post-
hover (firebug had a drop-down that would "segment" itself when hovered, for
example).

Add this to the completely non-native tabs and toolbar, and the lack of a
status bar, and the UI is simply unusable imo. A native UI using an
established toolkit, or a custom-built UI with usability in mind would both be
preferable to the current halfway kludge.

~~~
shortlived
_Firefox 4 still has a huge number of UI issues on linux due to reliance on
XUL for the UI_

Does that mean that other platforms do not use XUL for UI?

~~~
gue5t
The XUL "backends" for Windows and Mac OS seems to work much better in my
experience. For one thing these platforms often have less variance in system
theming so things like fixed font colors (though as I mentioned these are
fixed in some areas, but not all) are harder to detect and aren't really
problematic in most usage.

------
cryptoz
I'm a web dev and need to keep 3.x around. Can I easily install these two
side-by-side or is that going to cause trouble for me? I'd love to use FF4 as
my main browser at work (well, in competition with Chrome anyway) but I can't
risk messing up 3.

~~~
ksdsh
You may use the portable version of firefox from portableapps.com.

------
lordlarm
Am I the only one that does not understand why Firefox still has a 'Google
search' field at the left? Why not use Chrome's approach and merge the two of
them - at least give me the possibility to hide it. (And I am aware of the
possibility so search in other sites than google, but I 'never' want to do
that.)

~~~
holygoat
Everything you type in Chrome's location bar is sent to Google, most likely
unencrypted. Every single character.

If you want to turn this behavior on in Firefox, you can do so with a simple
add-on:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/omnibar/>

but it's off by default because of the MASSIVE privacy implications.

~~~
joesb
Just because Chrome does that doesn't mean Firefox must do exactly the same.

Merging location bar and search bar doesn't mean you can't give URL higher
priority or that you must query search suggestion every key stroke.

~~~
ootachi
Well, Firefox basically does that already, then. You can enter search terms in
the URL bar and hit Enter to search. If you then hide the search box, you've
got what you suggest.

------
jmcnevin
I'm a little conflicted about the Firefox Sync feature. On the one hand: yay!
On the other... it's a lot more difficult to set up sync in Firefox than in
Chrome. I got to work today and was dismayed to discover that I couldn't
simply login to Mozilla's server and sync up my bookmarks from home, but that
I needed the sync key from my computer at home to get this working. Boo. That,
or you need to have the devices you want to sync in the same place and use a
Netflix-like "Add Device" feature.

I get it. Encrypting locally is more secure, but they've made this system SO
secure that it's actually irritating. I wish I at least had the option of
foregoing this sync key business.

Anyway, now I know to put my sync key on Dropbox so this doesn't happen again.

~~~
holygoat
Yes, it's a little more complex than Chrome's sync... but Chrome's sync keeps
most of your data in cleartext on Google's servers, and even their optional
encryption is relatively weak (low-entropy key derived from your password). I
don't like that.

Mozilla can't see your data if we tried -- at that includes if we get a
subpoena. Firefox Sync's 128-bit secret key has to be transferred somehow. I
think that's worth the extra effort, and you only need to do the setup once.

(If you don't trust Mozilla, you can even run your own Sync server.)

Please don't _keep_ your sync key on Dropbox. It's important!

------
roadnottaken
Meh. One of the smoothest features of Chrome (that won a lot of adherents) was
how you could close lots of tabs quickly without moving the mouse (i.e. the
tabs only re-size after you move the mouse away). Same for opening tabs. How
did FF4 not copy this? It looks just like Chrome only crappier.

~~~
jlongster
That small of a nicety overshadows all of the other great things about Firefox
4?

Also, the Firefox team is implementing that but it didn't make it into this
release. You can find out all sorts of things they are working on at
<http://wiki.mozilla.org>.

~~~
roadnottaken
Down-vote, really? I was just giving my first impression, which was 'not
better than Chrome' and 'looks clunky'.

Also, Chrome has had that feature for over a year and in that time it's won a
lot of praise from a lot of places. Granted, it's just one little feature that
doesn't matter that much... but that's what people refer to when they speak of
"polish" and "user experience" and I think that stuff matters more to people
than you might think.

~~~
SkyMarshal
It's probably for the "only crappier". Makes you sound like an annoying Digg
refugee. Read the guidelines at the bottom of HN, it covers both tone/language
and complaining about getting downvoted.

------
nickolai
I find javascript refreshingly faster compared to 3.5 . I no longer even get
the "unresponsive script" messages when using the usual lot of JS-abusing
pages our "tools support" team has cooked up.

~~~
code_duck
I've observed a major improvement along those lines as well. Sites like
news.yahoo.com don't make the browser freak out anymore, hurrah!

------
bryanlarsen
Awesome timing. The latest version of chrome (10.0.648.15, Linux x86_64) hangs
on Google Reader and doesn't work with Flash for me. That gives me an excuse
to play with FF4 rather than futzing around downgrading chrome.

------
torsy
For the devs, you can now run Firebug in FF 4.
<http://blog.getfirebug.com/2011/03/21/firebug-1-7-0/>

------
barrkel
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.

~~~
huntero
I also had issues with blurry text while hardware acceleration is enabled.

I assume it is due to the Direct Draw, but I don't see the same issue in IE9
w/ hardware acceleration enabled.

~~~
jamesr
In IE9 h/w acceleration and Direct Write are controlled by the document's
rendering mode. Hacker News renders in quirks modes and thus uses GDI. Try
forcing the document to render in IE9 mode (open the F12 developer tools, hit
Alt-9) and the text will look much closer to Firefox 4's. The page layout will
also break a bit.

------
xtacy
FF4 is really fast and responsive, as advertised! Awesome work guys!

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but I really love the tab UI feeling
that I get in Chromium (the looks, the curves, etc.) Given that other projects
like Kod.app already copy that feature, is it possible for Firefox to
incorporate it as well?

------
kawera
For those with old ppc Macs, there is a port of FF4 Final at
<http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/>

Works great for me and is way faster than Safari 5.04 on a iMac G5 and a
Powerbook G4 (10.5.8 in both).

------
eftpotrm
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 _used_ - if this replicated
the old suite's behaviour of location bar searching outside the history I'd
mind less, but it doesn't. Having to grab the pointer every time I want to
search instead of Ctrl-E doesn't seem a win to me :-(

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

~~~
eftpotrm
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.

~~~
starwed
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._

------
tristanperry
I'm impressed with it.

Its UI is clear and responsive, and overall is seems quicker. Plus it uses up
around 40% less RAM (in my experiences).

------
codejoust
I've been using the betas over chrome for a few months now. They've redone the
UI, it's stabler, less memory intensive, and the UI is completely redone. It's
definitely worth checking out even if you enjoy chrome.

------
bsmith
I really would like to see a built-in PDF viewer–that's one of my favorite
features in Chrome because it keeps the download folder clean and lets me
reference several PDFs/pages without leaving the window.

------
stianan
Why is text aliased and ugly in Firefox 4?

~~~
mbrubeck
This is usually a graphics driver problem. Try updating your drivers or
disable hardware acceleration in the Firefox preferences (under Advanced:
General: Browsing).

~~~
henrikschroder
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?

~~~
stianan
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.

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

~~~
strmpnk
Actually, while it will do that it also tries to shift edges to lie on pixel
boundaries when possible. This distortion can make edges look clearer though
it also looks brutal with certain type faces. Most people like whatever they
are used to.

------
davidhollander
For anyone upgrading firefox on ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

------
mirkules
I am so glad they got rid of the link preview in the URL bar (like they had in
the RCs) and instead put in on the bottom left.

Usually, I have tabs open that change their title when something happens (e.g.
Gmail Inbox(1), or Facebook), and those catch my attention from the corner of
my eye. However, having the URL preview when hovering over a link go into the
URL bar on top also catches my attention, and distracts me from my current
workflow.

------
willheim
I was REALLY hopeful for FF to make a comeback with 4. I had been a convert in
the 2.X days and watched as it got bloated and slower throughout 3. Switched
to Chrome in version 9 and never looked back. Then IE9 came out and was so
much faster than before so I had hope for FF.

Well, that hope has been quickly dashed. How? By mozilla's own demo page, the
web'o'wonder. On my three year old machine it says my video drivers don't
support WebGL and won't play nice with many things. What it does play nice
with was not very wonderful. The "Letterheads" were choppy with a framerate
probably approaching 8 or 9 fps. The 360 video refused to load. Same with
Remixing Reality. IE9 wouldn't work with those and neither would Safari.

Then I tried them in Chrome. Huh. Go figure. They all worked marvelously.
Yup... this new web era could be a Web o' Wonders... but it looks like it
won't be featuring FF4 or IE9.

Now, can anyone tell me why FF4 has issues with WebGL but Chrome 11.0696
doesn't? And it's not just a webkit thing because Safari 5.04 isn't liking
them either.

~~~
sid0
Old graphics drivers usually have severe stability issues, so Mozilla
blacklists them. You need to update to more recent ones -- anything after
around June 2010 should do. Check out about:support for more information.
(Note that if you're on Linux Mozilla only whitelists the proprietary nvidia
driver IIRC, since all the open source drivers have issues.)

I don't think chrome has blacklisted anything yet, but from what I hear
Google's looking at doing it.

In general, the problem is with your computer, and not with your browser or
the demos.

~~~
willheim
When one browser (in this case, Chrome) works beautifully and the other
browser (in this case FF4) refuses to operate in some capacity then that is
most certainly not a problem with my computer.

Do you know how many people out there have the Mobile Intel 965 Express
Chipset Family for their laptops... a staggering number, I'm sure.

~~~
sid0
All you need to do is update to newer drivers. You can also force enable stuff
via about:config if you wish, and at your own risk.

The blacklisting is simply risk aversion -- I'm sure you're familiar with the
concept. A slow browser's better than a crashing one, and old drivers were
crashing too frequently. I repeat: the problem is not with Firefox -- the
problem is with your drivers. Chrome might be taking more chances with the
stability of your drivers, but that's Chrome's problem.

------
SkyMarshal
Just installed it on my netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04.

Motherfucking beautiful, guys, it feels like Christmas morning. Great work,
keep it up. (And I'm so stoked the Vimperator plugin works on launch, kudos to
that team too!).

Just working out the best way to install it side-by-side with 3.6 on my
workstation, which I'll need to keep a while for web dev testing.

------
ern
I am surprised that they got rid of the padlock icon. I had to Google before I
realized that they now use a colored section with the site name in the address
bar to show a secure connection. Not very obvious when you first start using
it.

I wonder if this change is going to be disruptive for users who are trained to
look for a padlock icon.

~~~
mbrubeck
This is an intentional change because we believe the padlock icon is
misleading and potentially harmful. Users were being told to "look for the
padlock" as a sign that a transaction was secure, when really it means no such
thing.

It's important that users actually verify the identity of the site -- a
"secure" (encrypted) transaction is no good if it's a secure connection to a
malicious site. The new security UI in Firefox is designed to emphasize
identity, rather than just encryption.

------
jlongster
Feel free to watch our launch party here: <http://air.mozilla.com/>

~~~
ciupicri
Too bad you're using Flash.

~~~
mbrubeck
air.mozilla.com normally uses HTML5 video, but the back-end that drives that
was not ready for Firefox 4 launch day traffic.

------
huhtenberg
And to mark the occasion FF4 RC2 just crashed on me twice in a row. Are there
any crashing issues fixed in the production release compared to RC2?

Also, the IE-style _reload_ button (at the right end of the address field) is
too small and awkwardly positioned. I never realized how often it is actually
used.

~~~
mbrubeck
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.

~~~
huhtenberg
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 like noone cares.

FF4 still has a milder version of the problem, but in a sub-second range. It
now crashes though, so not sure what's worse.

Also, unrelated to the above, for some reason Alt-PrtSc does not work, it's
FF4 on XP. It is supposed to make a screenshot of a focused window and put it
on a clipboard, and it worked with FF3... which is weird, because it's
Windows' native function, not Firefox's.

~~~
mbrubeck
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.

~~~
huhtenberg
Thanks for the response, Matt. Much appreciated.

------
ck2
Congrats to the team and thank you to everyone who contributed (even the
smallest bugfix) to help us all.

------
MichaelStubbs
After having some serious problems with the beta, I'm actually very impressed
with this release. Even on my parents' old ex-council computer (1ghz P4, 512mb
RAM, integrated graphics) this release is lightning fast!

~~~
cpach
Neat! Seems like a leap in performance then.

------
brown9-2
Does anyone have JavaScript performance benchmarks yet against Chrome?

~~~
anonymous1234
<http://arewefastyet.com/>

------
Kilimanjaro
Firefox user here since phoenix, switched to Chrome and never looked back. You
can't come to par with Chrome to make me switch back, you have to make me shit
my pants to do so, and Chrome did when they were the first to bring websockets
to the browser. They kept bringing good stuff like web inspector, so no need
to download firebug or any other extension. And joining the search bar with
the address bar is just genius.

In short, I prefer my browser naked, and Chrome is the best without clothes.

------
discipline
Damn them - damn them to hell. The thing that Firefox 3 did in Winidows (XP
anyway) that was so useful was that when you deleted trash or spam, it
automatically put the pointer on the OK button. Not the OS preference, but a
Firefox feature. It didn't work in OS X, but it worked in XP. They took that
feature away - I saw it in the beta, but was hoping they really hadn't deleted
it. Damn them.

OK, other than that, I like FF4! Just had to vent.

~~~
lazugod
Firefox is a browser; how do you delete spam from a browser?

------
Casis
Very nice, the UI is well designed, more screen estate.

Just 2 complaints:

\- The colors's arrows for previous/next are not really visible

\- When on a laptop, I used to open a link in a new tab by right click + open
in a new tab. This option was the second one in the previous firefox's
version, now it's the first, so I end up opening a lot of links in new window
instead of new tab, guess it's only a matter of time till I get the habit :)

~~~
rcurses
There's an extension called "Menu Editor" that allows you to edit the context
menus in Firefox. It works, but it can be confusing to use, because the
context menus are... so contextual.

In your case though, you could just swap the places of the "New Window" and
"New Tab" menu items.

Edit: here's a link to the extension <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/firefox/addon/menu-editor/>

~~~
Casis
Thanks for the info and the link!

------
jim_h
I hope the addons also get updated for FF4. I upgraded to FF4, but I miss
having the CS Lite addon.

'CS Lite' lets me manage cookie permissions for current site without having to
go into the preference and go through the long process. Very useful since I
usually block cookies and only turn on when needed. The reviews for CS Monster
doesn't seem as good.

~~~
JustinSeriously
Sometimes you can work around this.

Find the _install.rdf_ file for the plugin, and change the _maxVersion_
variable to "4.*".

It doesn't always work, but I've had good luck with it.

~~~
jim_h
Thanks. I'll give it a try later tonight.

------
jmcnevin
I just noticed that FF4 also has shiny new javascript confirm and alert
popups, complete with a lightbox effect. Nice!

~~~
mbrubeck
And not only are they shiny... they no longer prevent you from switching to
other tabs!

------
zachcb
I still like Opera the most. Easily the most innovative browser and much more
enjoyable to use.

------
dlokshin
Will Firefox 3.x auto update to 4?

~~~
mbrubeck
Yes, but not yet. We won't start pushing advertised updates to Firefox 3.x
users until a bit after the launch, to give time for any late-breaking issues
to shake out.

------
rostayob
The new vimperator is out as well, and it's great. this is way better than
crome now.

------
nickolai
Aw... i just wish they didnt swap "new tab" and "new window" in the right-
click on link menu. I understand the decision, but im so used to the previous
setup that I get owned every time :/

Apart from that, im really happy with this new version!

------
stevejohnson
I've been a Chrome user (OS X) for a while, but switched to FF4RC to see if it
used less memory than Chrome (not a difficult feat).

It was mostly great, except the UI would stop responding at random for minutes
at a time. So I'm back on Chrome.

------
pragmatic
Is Flash not installed by default?

Downloaded FF4 and several sites won't display.

Ex: Youtube says "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this
video."

Other sites just don't work.

Maybe I'm out of loop and need to update my desktop flash.

Man, chrome has ruined me with its auto-updating.

------
joel_liu
FF4 add on collection selected by Mozilla [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/collections/mozilla...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/collections/mozilla/firefox-4/)

------
va1en0k
I'd like to try to switch a browser, if I see a simple and cool sync-from-
chrome (google account) feature. maybe I don't really need one, and maybe I
can use some XML thingy for it, but I'm too lazy

------
veidr
Here's a mirror, just in case there are others for whom the main download site
is estimating nine hrs to go. (Mac OS X version)

    
    
      http://www.macupdate.com/download/10700/Firefox%204.0.dmg

------
ch0wn
I couldn't find any PPAs or packages for Ubuntu, yet. Did anyone else?

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

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

~~~
snagage
Does anyone know if they're doing one for 9.10? Googled around, can't find
anything on it

------
arturnt
Firefox market share is going to continue to shrink as Chrome takes over.
They've just been way too slow to respond. It is a shame since feature wise
Firefox is a superior browser.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Not necessarily. The two are about at market share parity now, and FF4 allows
Mozilla to push updates and version numbers more continuously, like
Chrome/ium. From this point on it should be a neck-and-neck horse race, but
frankly as long as they're both leaving IE in the dust I'm cheering for, and
using/developing to/supporting both.

------
dpcan
Uhg. Had to roll back to 3.6

The new one looks great and seems to run fast, but my most important add-ons
weren't supported. I hate being held back by my add-ons, but I have no choice.

------
joakin
Please help and advice your friends and family to update :)

Lets help mozilla!

~~~
aw3c2
No, I will push that moment into the future as far as possible.

Developers underestimate the trouble of "normal people" to adjust to GUIs and
then even more to drastic changes in those. At least half of my "customers"
for pc support will be rendered helpless once this upgrade comes.

------
diptanu
More importantly: Is FireBug available yet for FireFox 4?

~~~
holygoat
Yes!

<http://blog.getfirebug.com/2011/03/21/firebug-1-7-0/>

------
nixy
Using FF4 on Hacker News main page gives me a popup saying _TypeError:
a.textContent is undefined_.

~~~
mbrubeck
I'm not seeing that. Do you have any add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts
installed? Try safe mode: <http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+mode>

------
juiceandjuice
Three finger scroll up and down for home/end in OS X is really nice... I wish
this worked in chrome.

------
al_james
Wow. Is it me, or do those 'monster characters' on the landing page so really,
really amateurish?

------
pistoriusp
Has anyone else noticed that you can't drag the window from one space to
another under OS X?

~~~
wolfhumble
I thought so too, but it actually works (on 10.6 at least). You must only know
where the other spaces are located: North, South,East or West.

Or you can type F8 (default) and drag windows between them that way . . .

------
Duff
Have they improved the ability to manage Firefox settings in an enterprise
environment?

------
tutanosh
Hopefully we won't have to wait long for Firefox 5 cause Chrome is not sitting
still :)

~~~
holygoat
Three months.

~~~
bryanlarsen
We'll believe it when we see it, but we're definitely rooting for you.

------
cubicle67
just ticked over 6,000,000 downloads (in < 22 hours). well done guys

Edit: USA has top spot at the moment with 1.2 million, followed by Germany
with almost 550 thousand

------
khatarnaak
Great new browser...Heads off firefox guys..

------
khatarnaak
Its very fast compared to firefox 3.6.

------
DzHiBaS
tab key in form elements is not working. or it's just for me ?

~~~
holygoat
Probably just you. There could be a Flash embed in the page that's capturing
the keystroke...

------
jlouis
Doesn't work with my loved Quake Live plugin yet... uninstall :)

------
Mafana0
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.

~~~
mgcross
I'm on a netbook too (old one: 901), and FF is my preferred desktop/dev
browser, but Runfield is unplayably slow in FF4(2-3fps maybe) on my netbook,
whereas Chrome (10.0.6b) feels like it's hitting 15-20fps.

------
u48998
Two things:

1\. Sync is totally not up to par. It doesn't inform what it does in the
background and there is no place to check on the web what it uploads. I am not
sure why FF even bothered to release this feature when it is not even ready
(there are several people complaining about many things of Sync at the Add-on
review).

2\. The bookmark/history manager can use upgrade/better features. Ever since
the Delicious fiasco, FF could possibly play a better role in adding modern
bells and whistles to its bookmarks manager.

Other than above two, I'm not complaining.

~~~
holygoat
Sync intentionally doesn't allow you to see your data on the web: _it's
encrypted_. If you could view it through a webpage, it could be stolen or
subpoenaed, and we're not willing to take that risk with your passwords and
history.

If you want to see what Sync is doing, you can add the Sync icon to the Add-on
toolbar. If you _really_ want to see what it's doing, turn on logging and look
in about:sync-log!

~~~
u48998
Speaking of private data and encryption, do you know which FF file is
responsible for History data? I know the Bookmarks json file but I'm looking
to keep my history file as a backup too (which I believe FF doesn't backup
like it does bookmarks). I hope it isn't places.sqlite file because it gets
ridiculously huge even after you wipe your data clean.

I wish to rely on my own backup system for both bookmarks and history data as
both of them are important on continuous basis and both of them should be
user's own responsibility (unlike what delicious or many other bookmarks
syncing services may tell you).

~~~
mbrubeck
Yes, places.sqlite stores the history. The reason it grows by large increments
(and does not shrink to very small sizes) is to prevent file fragmentation,
which can have a big effect on the speed of the browser.

~~~
starwed
And, I'd assume that even if deleting history doesn't shrink places.squlite,
someone who wants to create a backup will be compressing it. And a mostly
empty but large file _should_ compress to a tiny file, right?

------
diamondhead
Addons manager looks nice and useful compared to previous one but still I know
many people who would prefer to use package managers for managing addons

------
orionlogic
Still my Pareto principle usage of FF: Firebug + Web dev. Toolbar.

If only those extentions functions exactly the same with webkit browsers.If
only...Does anybody hearing me?

------
techsavys
You can download the Firefox 4 Final from here :
[http://www.techsavys.info/2011/03/firefox-4-final-
downloads-...](http://www.techsavys.info/2011/03/firefox-4-final-downloads-
available-though-its-not-officially-launched-configure-your-latest-firefox-to-
run-older-add-ons.html)

~~~
mtogo
Or you could download it right from mozilla's own website,
<http://firefox.com> and bypass the blogspam.

