Firefox 4, Hate it or Love it?

[DtY]

Zren @ Tue Mar 22, 2011 5:32 pm wrote:

For the love of stats whores everywhere (and simple children who like flashy things)...

http://glow.mozilla.org/

Oh, and the backend of this flashy toy is pretty deep: http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2011/03/22/how-glow-mozilla-org-gets-its-data/.

No flash! I think I'm in love <3

[FilliP]

I like it really. There are less errors appear while using.

[Fasih]

I like it. The interface looks much better.

[BigBear]

The interface looks like Chrome

[Insectoid]

It looks like Chrome would look, if Chrome sucked. It copied the basic shape of Chrome, but none of the details that make chrome's UI great.

[andrew.]

Insectoid @ Tue Apr 19, 2011 4:57 pm wrote:

It looks like Chrome would look, if Chrome sucked. It copied the basic shape of Chrome, but none of the details that make chrome's UI great.

Hit the nail on the head right there.

[BigBear]

Chrome has no menu bar at all at least you can still press alt and find all the feature where you are used to them being

[Brightguy]

OK, I've been waiting for Ubuntu to update to Firefox 4, and it just happened.

Is there some principle in human–computer interaction that says the program interface should change with every version? Or is the field of HCI advancing so rapidly that the recommended interfaces change every year? Or does Firefox just ignore HCI principles?

Honestly, none of those sound believable. I'm just mystified by the whole thing.

DtY @ Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:40 pm wrote:

No flash! I think I'm in love <3

Agreed. Flash: the bane of the web.

[XZNZ]

chrome's better no arguments lolz

[ecookman]

chrome doesn't have DownloadHelper tho :p

[mirhagk]

Well I gots to say guys, you can't have one browser. It's just not possible. I actually have IE9 FF4 and chrome installed (but never used really).

I use FF4 and IE9 almost interchangably. When one crashes, I open the other, etc.

Also I find that IE9 renders games and such at a much better rate, dunno if it FF4 uses the graphics card, or what it is that makes it slightly slower, but it's only an issue with games, so that's why I have both lol.

[Ecole]

Well, Firefox 4.0 is seems to be good but still it doesn?t supports all plug-ins in Firefox 3.6.

[ProgrammingFun]

Ecole @ Tue Jun 14, 2011 5:11 am wrote:

Well, Firefox 4.0 is seems to be good but still it doesn?t supports all plug-ins in Firefox 3.6.

And now they release Firefox 5, which should be called 4.1 but Mozilla is trying to make it look as if they are actually working more efficiently.
The only way it can be considered a version 5 is due to the fact that some add-ons that just started working with FF4 are now unsupported.

I just gave up on Firefox a little while ago and moved to Chrome (though I still do like it but I guess Angry Birds was a good temptation).

[Insectoid]

That's actually pretty ridiculous. We can, however, expect more frequent releases such as this from Mozilla due to a versioning convention change.

In my opinion, a new release should not be considered a new version unless there are major UI changes or significant innovations. If it's just an improvement on the existing version, it should be labelled an update. FF2->FF3 and FF3->FF4 were pretty major changes. FF4->FF5 is...not much change on the user end.

FF4->FF5 is more akin to OS X 10.5->10.6. Minimal UI updates. It feels like the same operating system. It's pretty much a winXP service pack.

If you've managed to grasp what my ramblings attempt to convey, you'll understand I agree with ProgrammingFun. This should have been 4.1.

However, this may be a marketing strategy. People will see Chrome at V11, Safari at V5, Opera at V11 and IE at V9. The less informed might think that FF is behind the times, or hasn't been in development as long, because it is only at V4. This is the also one of the reasons the Xbox is labelled 360. Microsoft didn't want to call it the Xbox 2, because then people would see it on the shelves next to the PS3, and buy the 'newer' console.

[ProgrammingFun]

Insectoid @ Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:01 pm wrote:

However, this may be a marketing strategy. People will see Chrome at V11, Safari at V5, Opera at V11 and IE at V9. The less informed might think that FF is behind the times, or hasn't been in development as long, because it is only at V4. This is the also one of the reasons the Xbox is labelled 360. Microsoft didn't want to call it the Xbox 2, because then people would see it on the shelves next to the PS3, and buy the 'newer' console.

...a result of Mozilla desperately trying to regain market share (though I guess Google follows the same technique but at least they don't build up hype due to automatic upgrades).
Firefox is becoming stagnant like IE and Chrome, primarily due to its speed and "store", will end up overtaking it.

As a further proof of random changes (to build onto Insectoid's point), their change log mentions nothing about any real change that a regular user would notice:

Mozilla wrote:

Added support for CSS animations
The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability
Tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance
Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance
Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
Improved spell checking for some locales
Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users
WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures
Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance
Fixed several stability issues
Fixed several security issues

Well, back to exam prep them