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

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 One thing I can't find is this new way to organise tabs into groups, I've actually had to press F1 for help and look on the Mozilla website. It seems they are called Tab Groups, what a logical name, the keyboard shortcut isn't quite so logical. CTRL-SHIFT-E? Come on you can do better than that! Why not use the otherwise totally unused menu key that's on the right of my space bar? I wonder if I can rebind that? Certainly hiding this groovy option which you will want to use quite a lot and having to either press an awkward combo like that or click a button to get up a drop down and then click a menu option, is not good.

And how do you group tabs? Dragging and dropping them onto each other? Nope, that just moves them around. Ah it seems I misunderstand how this all works, my current tabs are all in one big group. I need to drop them off that area to create others. This is quite cool, you have a sort of free-form organised pasteboard which takes me back to my Pagemaker days. You can resize groups, which automatically sizes their previews, delete them and undo the process it was an accident, though for quite how much longer after I don't know yet.

So all my photography pages that I was browsing are now in a group together, likewise a few mini-coding projects I was working on. Once again Firefox has leapfrogged Microsoft, and actually all the other browsers for that matter, with this feature alone. You can even name groups, and there is snapping to edges and nearby groups to let you organise them neatly. Shame about that keyboard shortcut.

Incidentally whenever you are viewing a web page in a Tab Group, you only see the other tabs from that group. So these are effectively little self contained browsing sessions, it's sort of like having lots of different Firefox windows open for different jobs, but all in the same application. Me like. Me really like. The zooming when you click on tabs in a group is quite cute as well.

Conclusion

It was easy to draw a quick conclusion on Internet Explorer 9, if you used IE already it was a good upgrade. You can say the same here about Firefox, if you currently use this browser it is a no brainer. I'd also recommend moving to Firefox if you use IE, even the new IE9, simply because the performance is similar but Firefox has better HTML5 support, Mozilla patch security flaws faster than Microsoft, and speed is the only thing that made IE9 a remotely better option than Firefox 3.5 anyway.

Things might be less simple for Chrome, Safari and Opera users, particularly the first of that bunch. Most people choose Chrome because it is lean and mean, so they might not care for funky new options like the Tab Groups. This could be right up the street of Opera users though, as a browser it has pioneered tiny previews. Safari fans most likely choose that browser (if they run it on Windows anyway) because they prefer how it makes pages look, particularly font wise.

Either way, the quick small download is worth a go for any browser user, and definitely a must for Firefox fans.Previous Page

Posted by Robert John Shepherd