Firefox 4, Hate it or Love it?

[RandomLetters]

I like the tabs on top in chrome. It associates with the address bar better and is more like basically having separate windows in one app.

[Insectoid]

They already are separate processes. It's as close to a completely different window as you can get without being in a completely different window.

[BigBear]

Also people are suggesting every ff tab to be a separate process that they can kill as to not have to kill all their tabs.

I think it is silly to run chrome.exe every time you have a new tab

[Insectoid]

I dunno how it works on Winders, but on osx, running Chrome launches a 'backbone process', of which each tab is a child (or so it appears). It'd be like having a chrome.exe, and a separate application that Chrome launches for each tab.

[RandomLetters]

For windows I think there is 1 main chrome.exe, and then each tab is an extra process, since I always have more processes than tabs. Either that, or something is terribly, terribly wrong.

[DtY]

It's like running a threaded server. You might be running five Apache processes, but it's not the same as running five instances of Apache.

[DemonWasp]

...except that in general, threaded servers use actual threads, instead of processes. Generally, threads are lighter, and there can be many threads "inside" any given process.

I think there was some reason they chose to go with processes over threads; I think it was something about some kinds of I/O blocking an entire process instead of just the calling thread, though I can't remember where I heard that.

[2goto1]

There are a lot of Chrome architectural resources that explain their motivations for taking a process based approach, http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/multi-process-architecture

Google also had a very high-level cartoon that they published at the time Chrome was first released, but I can't seem to find it right now

[ProgrammingFun]

2goto1 @ Mon Mar 07, 2011 8:22 pm wrote:

Google also had a very high-level cartoon that they published at the time Chrome was first released, but I can't seem to find it right now

Was it this one?

[2goto1]

Yep

[BigBear]

http://canweshipyet.com/

almost released

[SS1389]

Viewing your Hotmail email on Firefox 4 is a nightmare.

[SNIPERDUDE]

I switched from Hotmail a few months back - I found Hotmail in general was a nightmare.

[ProgrammingFun]

SS1389 @ Wed Mar 16, 2011 11:51 am wrote:

Viewing your Hotmail email on Firefox 4 is a nightmare.

It works fine for me....

[Insectoid]

FF4 still doesn't complete the Acid 3 test. Gets stuck on 97/100. Chrome gets 100/100 on it.

I just downloaded it, and it looks to be copying Chrome's UI, however it's doing a poor job of it. Chrome is designed to take very little space. Firefox...isn't.

On OSX, Chrome inlines the title bar with the tabs- as in, the tabs are at the same height as the close/minimize/maximize buttons. Firefox does not do this.

Similarly, the home/back/refresh buttons on FF4 are quite glaringly large, as opposed to Chrome's small but accessible buttons on the same level as the address bar.

I haven't used it enough to gauge performance, and I'm not likely to. Chrome is just instantly better.

I can't say I'm biased. I used Firefox for years, switched to Chrome, and after a few initial hiccups it does everything better than Firefox ever did.