Firefox 4 First Impressions
Tuesday, 22nd March 2011, 16:30

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 After trying out IE9 last week, it seems only fair to write about what my first impressions of the final release version of Firefox 4 are, having just downloaded it. Needless to say installation is a lot less painful than Internads Exploder (to coin an old nickname), you can update simply by going to the Help menu and choosing the Check for Updates option. Once it's found there is one, it asks if you want to download it, warning that some add-ons might not work with the latest version and will be disabled for now.

When it has finished the download, you have the option (as always) to apply now or later. When you apply the update it closes the browser and starts the upgrade, UAC prompt in-between. I run a fair few extensions, mainly related to web development, and the ones it reported would not work were mostly these. No Firerainbow, HTML Validator, Page Speed Closer Compiler or VMware Remote Console Plug-in for me until they get updated. Worryingly still, no Firebug! How can I code for a web platform without Firebug! Panic on that front was quickly over, turns out there is a newer version of it, and also the HTML Validator, the others I can live without for now.

So yes, installation a total breeze, Mozilla and Open Source is greater than Microsoft... again. But that's enough bitching about a company that didn't write the product I'm looking at, let's see how things have improved.

Literally My First Impressions

A confession before I go on. I'm a tabaholic, I use loads of them, part of the reason I've been looking forward so much to FF4 has been the way you can group tabs in a new fangled system, and another part the promised speed increases from the new Javascript engine and the DirectX accelerated display path. In the past, my work day consisted of launching Firefox with the 10 or so tabs I had open from the previous 24 hour period, waiting a fair few seconds for it to actually become usable after loading all those, then I load another 20 or so I check regularly, chugging it even more.

At some point after that, with Firefox 3.5 and before, I'd being moaning about how much Flash is ruining the performance and responsiveness of the app, sit through a few YouTube videos with random pauses that eventually annoy me so much, I close and relaunch the whole app hoping it has fixed things. Which it does, for a while, until again I end up repeating the process at least once more that day.
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Posted by Robert John Shepherd