Browser vendors talk about benchmarks all the time but what really matters to me is startup and closing times; here Chrome really shines and FF3.6 is slow as hell.<p>It's probably about perception; maybe the browser should show a window even if it's not really ready (and maybe there is a problem with plugins and add-ons that need to initialize themselves, etc.)<p>Anyway, how is FF4b7 doing in this regard...?
Changes noticed on Mac since Beta 6:<p>* The stop/reload button has moved to the right end of the URL bar.<p>* The status bar is gone; URLs appear in ghosted text on the right side of the URL bar when you hover over a link.<p>* You can enable an "add-on bar", which appears to be a replacement status bar that add-ons can add icons to. None of the add-ons I have installed (about 20) are making use of it, so the transition from overlaying the status bar to overlaying the add-on bar must not be automatic.<p>* In the Add-ons Manager, an explicit "Remove" button has replaced the small "X" icon that used to be used for uninstalling an add-on.<p>* A more colorful throbber.
Asa Dotzler says we should 'move on' to other, more relevant benchmarks, since everyone is basically fast enough on this one:
<a href="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sunspider_numbe.html" rel="nofollow">http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sun...</a><p>I definitely agree here - newer benchmarks are much more interesting, as sunspider doesn't really tax any VMs these days.
Browsers are going mainsteam and it spells bad news for the browser vendors and good news for the users. All browers nowadays pretty much look the same, have the same performance and try desperately to distinguish themselves with surrounding features.<p>The basic problem is that the browser is still "trapped in a sandbox", ie they're trying to become the OS but they're still just an application running in a limited context. If all browsers looks the same and perform the same it's going to be real difficult to differentiate yourself from
the competion.<p>It makes sense from big guys point of view. Apple, Microsoft and Google must be present in the browser space to be competitive, especially google whose strategive agenda involves moving application from the OS to the web. For Firefox and Opera things look a bit more bleak IMO.<p>I think browsers will be commoditized to the degree it will be very difficult to compete, it will all come down to brand awareness and surrounding features.<p>My hunch is that Firefox and Opera is dying a slow death and will be irrelevant within 3 years.
I would use 4.0 Beta full-time if Firebug and Yahoo's Delicious extensions were updated. The memory utilization is great just like Firefox 3.6. Compare sometime the memory utilized while running many tabs in Chrome vs. Firefox over a prolonged period of time.<p>Update: I found Firebug has an alpha release supporting Firefox 4. <a href="http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.7X/" rel="nofollow">http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.7X/</a>
Seems very buggy. This is what mine looks like:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/64D7h" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/64D7h</a><p>Also, here are a few other issues:<p>* Navigating to www.google.com gives me a 302 page before redirecting me to the localized version (seems like it does this on other sites as well)<p>* The AdBlock icon is missing<p>* No status bar means I can't access my NoScript, MultiProxy Switch, or FireBug addons easily<p>* Sometimes tabs just refuse to close<p>* It didn't seem to want to upload the above image to imgur.com. Might have been some other problem but it worked in IE8.<p>* The back button doesn't work (backspace does though)<p>* ctrl-shift-t doesn't work ("Restore recently closed tabs" is greyed out)<p>* When I submitted this comment I wasn't redirected to the comment page - a blank page was all I got (same thing that happened on imgur, so I'm assuming it's a related issue)<p>* Sometimes I get stuck in the Tab Groups window and I can't return to the main view<p>This is all within 10 minutes of installation, so I'm expecting to find more bugs.
Can anyone elaborate on the XPCOM improvements? I thought the plan was to get rid of XPCOM all together in firefox 4.<p>Very nice set of improvements though. Not sure about firefox 4, but firefox 3 was a memory hog.
The changing of the Panorama hotkey from ctrl+space to ctrl+e ist slightly annoying. I know that ctrl+k does the same trick and has been there for far more versions, but I've always used ctr+e for the search bar, mainly because that's the one that also works in other browsers. Of course I'm sure it will only take two seconds to find out how to change this back...
Nice work Mozilla.<p>Sometimes I wonder why we give so much importance for 1-2 second page load / javascript improvements. Does average user <i>really</i> care about 1-2 second difference?
The "Web Console" is pretty awesome, but I don't see a way to close the detailed view things. Also I don't see POST contents in the detailed view things.
But does the user interface still respond like molasses in January? Last time I tried Firefox 4, I could have sworn my entire PC was locking up any time I clicked my mouse on any piece of the browser besides the web pages it was rendering.<p>No offense or anything, it was just an insurmountable obstacle, and without reasonable UI performance, render times and tab changes mean nothing.
Congrats Mozilla on the release!<p>Odd title though for this post, for where is the "everyone"? The link shows comparisons to previous versions of Firefox, not other browsers.<p>One thing I hope they fix before final release though is the constant CPU usage when you have many tabs open. I thought the Panorama feature was supposed to address this. It's currently idling at around 25% CPU for me, and no, unfortunately I can't blame it on Flash. :-\