Beta: Firefox 4b5

In terms of performance the early betas showed promise. Yet one of the only thing I really like is the tab group feature. If Mozilla doesn't up their game in the next couple of betas Chrome will eat their lunch and marketshare.

Oh it was so easy to wow the users back when it was just IE6/7 vs Firefox vs Opera.

Competition is making every browser better.

 

I wish I could get what the all the fuss over Chrome is about. It works well, but so do many other browsers. Why do people like the fact that Chrome is not configurable? Why is such a minimalist UI considered desirable instead of dumbed down? Every major browser has a full-screen mode that eliminates menus and toolbars. Firefox can do everything Chrome can do plus a whole lot more if you want it to. I'm not trying to tick off Chrome users. I just want them to explain what the point is...

 

How to Start a Lively Discussion 101

 

Honestly I don't get it either. Yes, it's clean..too clean. Security aside, there is nothing there that makes it "better" than another browser. Speed, whatever, Firefox loads pages for me in milliseconds, provided there is no slowdown on a particular website or some idiotic 3rd party script that wants to keep trying to load. The benefit of extensions isn't so much of a benefit when extensions either cause havoc with the browser or half-work. Even the ad-blocking extension can't work like it should because Chrome doesn't supply the needed function for it to do so. Script control is a joke, more times than not, hitting the enter key to conduct a search in the "omnibar" results in Chrome sitting there doing nothing until you hit the enter key again.

I could go on and on about its problems, but, sticking to the point, without the security factored in, there's nothing special about it. If the other browser vendors are trying to be more "Chrome-like", we're in for a mess.

 

You're right, sorry.

On-topic, I had a chance to use the previous beta and, while alright, I'm not blown away by any means. I and a few others here in my area think all this tab stuff just adds "fluff" really. Maybe I could see some applications where it might be useful, otherwise it's not really a big deal. Tabs up top is a welcome change, it opens up a lot of space. Since I don't worship benchmarks, I can't give a technical opinion on speed, I can only say it's just as fast as it has always been. I'm not expecting to get much out of the HTML5 support as I can count on my hand the number of websites I've come across using it, one or two of which I purposely searched out.

 

Thanks.

I like Chrome's minimalist UI, therefore I decided to make Firefox like that. I used to put tabs at bottom in multi-row using Tab Mix Plus when I used 3.x.x, there wasn't much space for the page. I like the changes with 4, Tabs on top, glass theme etc, with some tweaks I ended up with this:



It's good the tab bar is scrollable because I usually open lots of tabs. Most of the popular add-ons are already updated and there are fixes for some others therefore it's good enough to be my main browser.

 

As far as I'm concerned, the defaults are well-thought-out and elegant, and that counts much more to me than a crap UI that I need to spend time tweaking and installing themes to de-suck. YMMV, of course.

Full-screen mode isn't the same, as it eliminates a lot of controls needed for proper browsing (most notably the location bar).

That's true. Except that Chrome does everything I want, and in a faster, sleeker, more secure package. Features isn't a contest of numbers, it's about having the ones that you, the user, want. So why not.

 

We are agreed, features isn't a contest of numbers. It's about choice and FF offers more of them (uh oh, here I go again ).

Anyway my apologies to the Admins, and to get back on topic...I read that in Firefox 4b5 GPU hardware acceleration is turned ON by default. That sounds great, but can someone say specifically where that would come into play? The flash plugin is already making use of hardware acceleration as of v10.1 and I haven't seen a significant difference when (for instance) playing Youtube video since installing it. I guess I've been expecting there to be a noticeable jump in performance as there is when playing games with hardware acceleration Vs software emulation, but I don't see it yet.

 

Firefox 4b5 doesn't support GPU acceleration if you're using an integrated Intel graphics card.

To see if it's working, you can run the demos at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ with and without a GPU-accelerated browser.

 

There is an in-depth discussion or Direct2D and DirectWrite in http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1775755.

In my case it works well, but I am still having some crashes.
With hardware acceleration and "panorama" (tabs grouping, the browsing experience is different and better with respect to previous FF versions.

 

Since, for the time being, I'm stuck with an integrated GPU, I haven't been able to test this. If you are able to and have already, what is your opinion of it? Without giving me a bunch of benchmarks, which people here know I don't look at too seriously, what visible difference does it truly make?

 

http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/09/07/firefox-4-beta-bringing-hardware-acceler
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

If you really want to see it for yourself, Chromium supports GPU acceleration on old Intel cards (at least it does on mine). Instructions at the end of this article. Watch how Firefox and Chromium perform at the IE9 demos.

 

Thanks for the links, I may try out Chromium in a bit.

 

I don't find this any faster or slower than 4b4, Chrome 7.0 testing still knocks it hands down.

 

When I updated from beta4 via app's updater, and also then trying a clean install, I got this alert. Does it indicate, perhaps, a corrupt profile? Haven't seen it before.

 

Ok Ron, many thanks, will do.

 

I've been using the Minefield 4.0b7pre in Linux Mint and there are some very nice changes.
If you hover over a link it will show you the link in the url bar and not in the status bar. I am not sure if this is aleady in the earlier betas for Windows but it nice. A few graphic touch ups too for Linux users. Speed has also slightly increased.

It is too bad that they are going to leave certain features out of Firefox 4.
Firefox 5 is a ways off.

 

Why would they leave stuff out, bugs, incompatibility or bloat?

 

time constraints, the more features they try to finalize for the final version (as in fix bugs, make sure its all working) means it would take a lot longer to release the final product

so they need to put a cut off point where they just focus on making all the features currently in it work properly

 

Because they overpromised and then realized they wouldn't be able to deliver before their self-imposed deadline.

Mozilla has a more or less established track record of doing this. Even with the dropped features, and their announced November deadline, I'm personally not too optimistic about seeing Fx4 final until after Christmas or early next year. We're already seeing signs of this, I think; iirc only 5 betas were initially planned, now beta 8 is slated for a 1st Oct release.