Firefox 4 Review
With the latest version Firefox 4.0 release, Firefox has taken a step ahead in the ‘war of browsers’. How correct this statement might be, this is what we will discuss in this article. The new version brings a transformed look making Firefox a much lighter and faster browser, thus enhancing its capability to compete with its rivals Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google chrome and Safari.
Mozilla said in a statement on its official blog “Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks” . So let’s take a closer look to find how much it’s worth. Gone are the days when Mozilla Firefox could make a splash simply by not being Internet Explorer. Today it must compete not only with Microsoft’s plodding browser, but also with the likes of Google Chrome, Apple Safari and the Opera browser – a rather taller order. Yet for now, Firefox 3 still boasts a market share of around 30 per cent, while its newer rivals have yet to break out of single digits. For that reason, the arrival of Firefox 4 is big news for the web, and this first public beta is a preview of what’s to come.
The newer version of Firefox from Mozilla is definitely better than Firefox 3.6 and is definitely worth trying out. Firefox 4 runs on the Gecko 2.0 web platform. Earlier today I downloaded Firefox 4 and put it through some drills, here is a review of Firefox 4 Beta 1 where you can find the new features and also the how Firefox 4 fares against other browsers in web browser benchmarks. Firefox 4 sports a completely different interface, some of which are from Opera and Google Chrome. Immediately on opening Firefox 4 you’ll spot one change – at least, you will if you’re using Windows. On this platform the tabs now sit above the address bar, rather than below it, and for the final release both Mac and Linux versions are set to follow suit. That may spark accusations of plagiarism from fans of Chrome, which has had them there all along; but the designers insist it’s a change based purely on usability analysis. Firefox 4 has some new buttons and also a unified menu which is similar to the one Opera 10.6 has. Mozilla has decided to follow Google in giving your tabs top visual priority. Unlike Chrome and Opera, however, Firefox 4 lets you turn this feature off should you prefer the old-school tabs bar. Tabs are on top by default only in Firefox 4 Beta for Windows at the moment. Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 offers a quick way to switch between multiple tabs through a search option in the Awesome Bar. Just place your cursor in the address bar and start typing the site or article name you wanted to find. An option should read 'Switch to tab' under the page title; just select that option and Firefox will quickly move you to that tab. This new feature becomes really handy once you have 12 or more tabs open and is a great alternative to cycling through your tabs with the Ctrl, Tab keyboard shortcut.
If you're using Google Docs, you will want to be careful when using the switch tabs feature. At one point, we wanted to switch away from a Google Doc we had open and go to another tab, but we soon changed my mind and wanted to keep working on the document. Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1, however, wasn't too happy about our decision and wouldn't let us work on the document after we had entered text into the address bar. To get access to our document again, we had to switch to another open tab and then come back to our Google Docs page. Hopefully, this is just a bug and Mozilla will fix it before Firefox 4's official
Mozilla said that Mac and Linux versions will have this feature when the theme has been modified to support the change. The menu bar is initially hidden and users can unhide it to go back to the older navigation found in Firefox 3.6 and below. Whether tabs should be on top or below the window bar is a matter of personal preference. The ability to kill this feature, however, is a big plus. Mozilla is obviously aware of a possible backlash so they put together a video explaining the rationality behind it, included below. If you have dozens of open tabs like me, getting back to that “peregrine” Wikipedia definition you opened hours ago easier said than done. Enter Switch to Tab, the new feature that lets one search across all open tabs using the address bar. Simply start typing “peregrine” and Firefox will include open matches in the list, denoted with “Switch to tab”. Select it, hit Enter, and Firefox switches to that tab .it’s as easy as that.
Firefox 4 represents the biggest revamp the browser has had since it launched and includes an engine re-write from the ground up. This has greatly boosted performance and added 64-bit capabilities, as well as ‘enhanced’ HTML5 support. There’s also a new add-on manager, which includes support for add-on sandboxing, thus preventing add-ons from crashing the browser. Mozilla has added an improved bookmarks manager and a better Aero Peek integration for Windows 7 users, too. What’s more, the interface has also had a complete overhaul and now looks remarkably similar to Opera 10.6. The tabs have been moved to the top to “make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser,” said Mozilla in a blog post. Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 beta 1 also fixes flaws in some web standards that “could expose your browser history.”
Firefox was the first browser to really capitalize on Internet Explorer’s deficiencies, but its market share has been stagnant for the past year – it stalled at around the 20 per cent mark after gaining a reputation of being a bit bloated in today’s hyper competitive market where speed seems to be everything.
For businesses, Firefox 4 brings no major enhancements – there’s still no management framework but some of its under-the-bonnet improvements could be invaluable in certain scenarios. One such feature is enhanced support for the JS-ctypes library. This cryptically named resource enables developers to write advanced extensions – of the sort that would previously have required delving into C++ in JavaScript. Since no platform-specific compilation is required, this makes it much easier to develop and maintain cross-platform extensions. The latest release of Safari also offers a JavaScript-based extension API, but using it means submitting to the legal and practical strictures of Apple’s developer programme. With Firefox you’re much freer, especially if you’re developing extensions for internal use.
Another new technology in Firefox 4 is WebSockets, a communication protocol that lets the browser exchange data with a server with an overhead of just two bytes per message. To put that in context, Mozilla developer Christopher Blizzard[/a] estimates that “Google Wave, which tries to do real-time communication with keystrokes, has a several-kilobyte overhead for just about every keystroke.” WebSockets is already implemented in the latest versions of Chrome and Safari, and for both in-house web applications and offsite services it has clear potential to slash network bandwidth requirements.
Firefox 4 also brings a degree of crash protection, so if a Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime plugin encounters a problem it shouldn’t take down the whole browser. And an update to CSS closes a loophole that previously made it possible for websites to snoop details of other sites that you’d previously visited.
Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 is earning praise for some of its updates, such as its improved security and more HTML 5 functionality - Firefox 4 scored 198 out of 300 points on the HTML 5 test page - but not everyone is pleased. Mozilla is being criticised for borrowing features from competing browsers, including Chrome and Opera. Nevertheless, Firefox 4 still manages to put its own stamp on each new feature, and we expect regular Firefox users will be very happy with most of the changes found in Firefox 4. For Windows 7 and Vista users, Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 does away with the regular menu categories across the top of the browser window. Instead, menu items have been consolidated under a new button on the upper left hand side. Mozilla has also rearranged and removed some of the menu options used in previous version of Firefox. Menu options such as Edit, Tools, and Help are gone, and things like your toolbars, add-ons and layouts are now filed under the Customize menu. Some of the more redundant user options such as stop and reload are also gone since most users are more likely to use the new unified stop/reload button instead.
Mozilla Firefox 4 has also removed the downloads and private browsing options. However, you can still access both functions using their keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl, Shift, P for private browsing and Ctrl, J for downloads. If you don't like the new menu set up, you can get rid of the Firefox Button and switch back to traditional menus by clicking Firefox, Customize, and Menu Bar. The Firefox Button works nicely with Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1's new tabs-on-top format to give you more screen space for viewing web pages. For now, tabs on top by default are only available for Windows users. But Mac OS X users can choose tabs on top as a layout option by right clicking on the toolbar. But we wouldn't recommend you try it as the tabs on top layout in OS X aren’t very attractive, and Mozilla says this is going to improve in future beta versions. Mozilla stressed that the Firefox button is “not at all finished,” adding that it misses some commands and doesn’t have the final visual style. Now, I must say I dislike the placement of the Firefox button: It sits atop your tabs that are supposed to be on top of everything. As a result, the button is unnecessarily wasting 18 vertical lines of your window real estate. I sure hope this is on the list of Mozilla’s to-do fixes for the Firefox button.
Firefox 4 supports WebM, a new royalty-free and open-sourced container for open HD video on the web that needs no third-party plugins in the supported browsers. The project, and its official codec called VP8, is being promoted by Google, Mozilla, Opera Software, Adobe, and Microsoft. WebM support won’t matter much until VP8-encoded content begins replacing H.264 and Flash videos, if ever. Firefox 4 Beta takes the recently introduced crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 a step further by enabling uninterrupted browsing when the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins crash – you simply reload the page instead the whole browser. Crash protection in the beta version works across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Alongside these developer-friendly upgrades there’s a predictable focus on wider web technologies, with both HTML5 and CSS3 support improved from previous versions of Firefox. Where html5test.com gave Firefox 3.6.6 (the current version at the time of writing) just 139 points out 300 for its feature support, Firefox 4 beta 1 now raises that score to 199 - with nine bonus points for its support for the WebGL 3D graphics interface. It’s still neck and neck with Chrome, which scored 197 points, and behind Safari on 207; but we’re definitely getting there. Meanwhile, in the Acid3 CSS test[/a] the new beta scored 97/100, up from 94/100 for the current version. Again, though, it’s not the front-runner: Safari, Chrome and Opera all scored full marks.
And it’s a similar story with performance. Firefox 4 introduces the new Gecko 2 layout engine and a tweaked JavaScript interpreter, but you probably won’t notice any improvement outside of a synthetic benchmark. On our test system (based on an Intel Core i5-750 processor) the new beta completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in an average time of 0.79 seconds, compared with 0.93 seconds for version 3.6.6. If JavaScript performance is important to you, you’d get a much greater speed boost by switching to Chrome (0.38 seconds) or Opera (0.36 seconds).
The final Firefox 4 release will include hardware-assisted graphics acceleration (full WebGL support and Direct2D experimental support on Windows, both disabled in the beta), optimized Javascript performance, and more granular privacy controls, in addition to built-in Firefox Sync (currently provided as a free Firefox add-on) to keep your browser preferences, history, bookmarks, passwords, and open tabs synchronized across your desktop and mobile platforms running Firefox.
With the latest version Firefox 4.0 release, Firefox has taken a step ahead in the ‘war of browsers’. How correct this statement might be, this is what we will discuss in this article. The new version brings a transformed look making Firefox a much lighter and faster browser, thus enhancing its capability to compete with its rivals Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google chrome and Safari.
Mozilla said in a statement on its official blog “Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks” . So let’s take a closer look to find how much it’s worth. Gone are the days when Mozilla Firefox could make a splash simply by not being Internet Explorer. Today it must compete not only with Microsoft’s plodding browser, but also with the likes of Google Chrome, Apple Safari and the Opera browser – a rather taller order. Yet for now, Firefox 3 still boasts a market share of around 30 per cent, while its newer rivals have yet to break out of single digits. For that reason, the arrival of Firefox 4 is big news for the web, and this first public beta is a preview of what’s to come.
The newer version of Firefox from Mozilla is definitely better than Firefox 3.6 and is definitely worth trying out. Firefox 4 runs on the Gecko 2.0 web platform. Earlier today I downloaded Firefox 4 and put it through some drills, here is a review of Firefox 4 Beta 1 where you can find the new features and also the how Firefox 4 fares against other browsers in web browser benchmarks. Firefox 4 sports a completely different interface, some of which are from Opera and Google Chrome. Immediately on opening Firefox 4 you’ll spot one change – at least, you will if you’re using Windows. On this platform the tabs now sit above the address bar, rather than below it, and for the final release both Mac and Linux versions are set to follow suit. That may spark accusations of plagiarism from fans of Chrome, which has had them there all along; but the designers insist it’s a change based purely on usability analysis. Firefox 4 has some new buttons and also a unified menu which is similar to the one Opera 10.6 has. Mozilla has decided to follow Google in giving your tabs top visual priority. Unlike Chrome and Opera, however, Firefox 4 lets you turn this feature off should you prefer the old-school tabs bar. Tabs are on top by default only in Firefox 4 Beta for Windows at the moment. Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 offers a quick way to switch between multiple tabs through a search option in the Awesome Bar. Just place your cursor in the address bar and start typing the site or article name you wanted to find. An option should read 'Switch to tab' under the page title; just select that option and Firefox will quickly move you to that tab. This new feature becomes really handy once you have 12 or more tabs open and is a great alternative to cycling through your tabs with the Ctrl, Tab keyboard shortcut.
If you're using Google Docs, you will want to be careful when using the switch tabs feature. At one point, we wanted to switch away from a Google Doc we had open and go to another tab, but we soon changed my mind and wanted to keep working on the document. Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1, however, wasn't too happy about our decision and wouldn't let us work on the document after we had entered text into the address bar. To get access to our document again, we had to switch to another open tab and then come back to our Google Docs page. Hopefully, this is just a bug and Mozilla will fix it before Firefox 4's official
Mozilla said that Mac and Linux versions will have this feature when the theme has been modified to support the change. The menu bar is initially hidden and users can unhide it to go back to the older navigation found in Firefox 3.6 and below. Whether tabs should be on top or below the window bar is a matter of personal preference. The ability to kill this feature, however, is a big plus. Mozilla is obviously aware of a possible backlash so they put together a video explaining the rationality behind it, included below. If you have dozens of open tabs like me, getting back to that “peregrine” Wikipedia definition you opened hours ago easier said than done. Enter Switch to Tab, the new feature that lets one search across all open tabs using the address bar. Simply start typing “peregrine” and Firefox will include open matches in the list, denoted with “Switch to tab”. Select it, hit Enter, and Firefox switches to that tab .it’s as easy as that.
Firefox 4 represents the biggest revamp the browser has had since it launched and includes an engine re-write from the ground up. This has greatly boosted performance and added 64-bit capabilities, as well as ‘enhanced’ HTML5 support. There’s also a new add-on manager, which includes support for add-on sandboxing, thus preventing add-ons from crashing the browser. Mozilla has added an improved bookmarks manager and a better Aero Peek integration for Windows 7 users, too. What’s more, the interface has also had a complete overhaul and now looks remarkably similar to Opera 10.6. The tabs have been moved to the top to “make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser,” said Mozilla in a blog post. Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 beta 1 also fixes flaws in some web standards that “could expose your browser history.”
Firefox was the first browser to really capitalize on Internet Explorer’s deficiencies, but its market share has been stagnant for the past year – it stalled at around the 20 per cent mark after gaining a reputation of being a bit bloated in today’s hyper competitive market where speed seems to be everything.
For businesses, Firefox 4 brings no major enhancements – there’s still no management framework but some of its under-the-bonnet improvements could be invaluable in certain scenarios. One such feature is enhanced support for the JS-ctypes library. This cryptically named resource enables developers to write advanced extensions – of the sort that would previously have required delving into C++ in JavaScript. Since no platform-specific compilation is required, this makes it much easier to develop and maintain cross-platform extensions. The latest release of Safari also offers a JavaScript-based extension API, but using it means submitting to the legal and practical strictures of Apple’s developer programme. With Firefox you’re much freer, especially if you’re developing extensions for internal use.
Another new technology in Firefox 4 is WebSockets, a communication protocol that lets the browser exchange data with a server with an overhead of just two bytes per message. To put that in context, Mozilla developer Christopher Blizzard[/a] estimates that “Google Wave, which tries to do real-time communication with keystrokes, has a several-kilobyte overhead for just about every keystroke.” WebSockets is already implemented in the latest versions of Chrome and Safari, and for both in-house web applications and offsite services it has clear potential to slash network bandwidth requirements.
Firefox 4 also brings a degree of crash protection, so if a Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime plugin encounters a problem it shouldn’t take down the whole browser. And an update to CSS closes a loophole that previously made it possible for websites to snoop details of other sites that you’d previously visited.
Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 is earning praise for some of its updates, such as its improved security and more HTML 5 functionality - Firefox 4 scored 198 out of 300 points on the HTML 5 test page - but not everyone is pleased. Mozilla is being criticised for borrowing features from competing browsers, including Chrome and Opera. Nevertheless, Firefox 4 still manages to put its own stamp on each new feature, and we expect regular Firefox users will be very happy with most of the changes found in Firefox 4. For Windows 7 and Vista users, Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1 does away with the regular menu categories across the top of the browser window. Instead, menu items have been consolidated under a new button on the upper left hand side. Mozilla has also rearranged and removed some of the menu options used in previous version of Firefox. Menu options such as Edit, Tools, and Help are gone, and things like your toolbars, add-ons and layouts are now filed under the Customize menu. Some of the more redundant user options such as stop and reload are also gone since most users are more likely to use the new unified stop/reload button instead.
Mozilla Firefox 4 has also removed the downloads and private browsing options. However, you can still access both functions using their keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl, Shift, P for private browsing and Ctrl, J for downloads. If you don't like the new menu set up, you can get rid of the Firefox Button and switch back to traditional menus by clicking Firefox, Customize, and Menu Bar. The Firefox Button works nicely with Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 1's new tabs-on-top format to give you more screen space for viewing web pages. For now, tabs on top by default are only available for Windows users. But Mac OS X users can choose tabs on top as a layout option by right clicking on the toolbar. But we wouldn't recommend you try it as the tabs on top layout in OS X aren’t very attractive, and Mozilla says this is going to improve in future beta versions. Mozilla stressed that the Firefox button is “not at all finished,” adding that it misses some commands and doesn’t have the final visual style. Now, I must say I dislike the placement of the Firefox button: It sits atop your tabs that are supposed to be on top of everything. As a result, the button is unnecessarily wasting 18 vertical lines of your window real estate. I sure hope this is on the list of Mozilla’s to-do fixes for the Firefox button.
Firefox 4 supports WebM, a new royalty-free and open-sourced container for open HD video on the web that needs no third-party plugins in the supported browsers. The project, and its official codec called VP8, is being promoted by Google, Mozilla, Opera Software, Adobe, and Microsoft. WebM support won’t matter much until VP8-encoded content begins replacing H.264 and Flash videos, if ever. Firefox 4 Beta takes the recently introduced crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 a step further by enabling uninterrupted browsing when the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins crash – you simply reload the page instead the whole browser. Crash protection in the beta version works across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Alongside these developer-friendly upgrades there’s a predictable focus on wider web technologies, with both HTML5 and CSS3 support improved from previous versions of Firefox. Where html5test.com gave Firefox 3.6.6 (the current version at the time of writing) just 139 points out 300 for its feature support, Firefox 4 beta 1 now raises that score to 199 - with nine bonus points for its support for the WebGL 3D graphics interface. It’s still neck and neck with Chrome, which scored 197 points, and behind Safari on 207; but we’re definitely getting there. Meanwhile, in the Acid3 CSS test[/a] the new beta scored 97/100, up from 94/100 for the current version. Again, though, it’s not the front-runner: Safari, Chrome and Opera all scored full marks.
And it’s a similar story with performance. Firefox 4 introduces the new Gecko 2 layout engine and a tweaked JavaScript interpreter, but you probably won’t notice any improvement outside of a synthetic benchmark. On our test system (based on an Intel Core i5-750 processor) the new beta completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in an average time of 0.79 seconds, compared with 0.93 seconds for version 3.6.6. If JavaScript performance is important to you, you’d get a much greater speed boost by switching to Chrome (0.38 seconds) or Opera (0.36 seconds).
The final Firefox 4 release will include hardware-assisted graphics acceleration (full WebGL support and Direct2D experimental support on Windows, both disabled in the beta), optimized Javascript performance, and more granular privacy controls, in addition to built-in Firefox Sync (currently provided as a free Firefox add-on) to keep your browser preferences, history, bookmarks, passwords, and open tabs synchronized across your desktop and mobile platforms running Firefox.
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