Testing Firefox 4 RC
I finally decided to hop on the band wagon and try out the new Firefox 4 Release Candidate. I’ve been going back and forth between sticking with 3.6.15 and trying out 4.0 RC, not sure if I should bother with taking the plunge now or wait for the full release, I discovered that all but one of my plug-ins were compatible. That pretty much got me on board.
To help myself get ready for the new changes in 4.0 RC, I read through threads on /g/ to see what people liked and disliked about it. So far I’m enjoying my experience with it. Sure there have been a one or two annoyances but overall I think it’s quite good.
There are two noticeable changes with Firefox 4.0. First, the menu bar is hidden by default, replaced with an icon on the upper left, and tabs are now at the top of the browser.
This is the new add-ons manager, it now opens up as a tab rather than a separate window.
Current extensions I’m using. The only one that was not compatible was Blacksheep which is an extension to detect if someone was using Firesheep in the same network I’m connected to. Quite pointless to have when there are only two people in this house (including me) and the other person is quite an idiot when it comes to all things technology related.
Back to the new menu icon, everything is easily accessible within 1 to 2 clicks. I currently have Menu Bar highlighted which will give you Firefox’s old menu bar.
Doesn’t really look good that way so I’ll stick with the new menu icon.
Another thing they took away is the status bar at the bottom. While this does free up some real estate, I do miss it a bit. There are some extensions that relied on it as well such as Greasemonkey. To make up for this, They added an Add-on Bar. It’s quite small and easy to miss plus I’m getting used to the extra viewing space so I decided to keep it hidden.
See? Quite small. Better off just keeping it hidden.
Other than an new icon for bookmarks and the fact that is now on the Navigation bar, there’s not much new with it. The bookmarks manager is still the same. Before I forget, I should mention that the stop and refresh buttons have been merged and are now located at the right of the url bar. The default setup had the bookmark icon on the far right and my Noscript icon between the forward/back and the url bar.
A new nifty feature in 4.0 is the tab groups. I don’t see myself using this feature a whole lot but I thought I should show some examples of what you can do with it.
It’s kinda like having different windows of Firefox but you only need to have one window open (stealth browsing anyone?) You can name each group so that you can keep track of whats going on in each group and you are not limited to just 2 tabs or 4 groups, the sky is your limit or rather your hardware’s capabilities are your limit. You can move them around and arrange them how ever you like. One thing I did not test is if the groups stay after your close Firefox. From what I gather, it is possible.
If you accidentally close a group it is possible to restore it. This feature seems to only work on the most recent closed group. Not sure if they’ll fix that for the final release.
A lot of people have complained about the way 4.0 renders text and I don’t see any problem with mine. Maybe I’m just blind or maybe my laptop doesn’t support the hardware acceleration at the moment but if your fonts in 4.0 looks like crap, just turn off hardware acceleration.
Finally this is another new feature added to 4.0. Since I’m on my laptop and hundreds of miles away from home, I won’t be testing out this feature anytime soon but I am interested in it. This would definitely save me a lot of time whenever I try to keep my desktop and laptop in sync.
Overall I am quite happy with Firefox 4.0 RC and I look forward to the full release. My current gripe (and it’s a minor one) is that clicking on the empty space next to the tabs does not open up a new tab like 3.6 did. I’ll get used to it eventually but sometimes old habits die hard.
Edit: Closing the window while having groups open causes Firefox to warn you about closing multiple tabs. When I open it up (after waiting 10 seconds), it opens up to the default home page but gives the option to restore the previous session. I’m assuming this only works if you use Firefox’s default home page.
Edit 2: I forgot to mention that with 4.0, if you highlight a plain text url and right click it, you are given the option to open it in a new tab. If I remember correctly, you needed an add-on to that in 3.6