Meet Firefox 4.0.1

[iwod]

There are lots of UI bugs and polish to be landed. But currently they are focusing on features and speed.

Firefox 2 & 3 felt lightweight and fast compared to other browsers. Now it feels like the big slow clunky one.

Well that is when comparing to IE which everyone was using at the time. It is still faster then IE ( IE9 being close / better depending on your PC )

Firefox isnt getting slower, Webkit is just damn fast.

[LiquidSolstice]

Wekbit is pretty damn fast, yes, but Presto, in my opinion, is even more blindingly fast (Opera). I just wish Firefox had caught up more quickly, I understand it doesn't have the commercial power that Google and OSA have, but still. I loved that browser and I still feel the addons platform was the best there ever was. I hope things buck up for them soon.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

...

Firefox isnt getting slower, Webkit is just damn fast.

And Firefox is catching up pretty fast, they're already faster than WebKit (Safari) on the v8 benchmark. And it's not far behind on SunSpider.

But, you'll always be able to find something that one browser is good at, that another browser isn't good at, the Biolab <canvas> game hits 60fps on my Mac in Safari, 50-52fps in Firefox (55fps+ in 32bit mode), while IE9 only gets 9-12fps on my PC with it.

[Udedenkz]

If Moz will fix all the bugs that are blocking Bata 8 and Final as well as land the 70 or so bugs that are ready to land, performance should be much better than it is now (Lots of bugs covering performance problems).

[primexx]

oh hey is beta 7 skipped?

[ambiance]

I've been using the nightlies and like what I'm seeing so far. I think the UI is simple and gets the job done. I don't mind the progress bar on top of the tabs, but when you have only one tab open it needs to fill the address bar.

[Guest mattburles]

does anyone here think we wont see beta 7 till late october/early november? :(

we are still at 14 blockers

[ViperAFK]

I've lost my faith in Firefox :(. Maybe again, someday, but each time I try it, it just feels slower and slower than the competitors. It was amazing when I first started using it (Firefox 2) but since then, it's been getting overtaken.

Yeah they need to work on the responsiveness of the UI the most. Does anyone else feel the UI is very laggy compared to all the competing browsers? Even compared to firefox 3.x. The whole UI often becomes unresponsive for a second when loading groups of tabs. Chrome and opera do not do this. Chrome and opera also have much smoother tab open and close animation, firefox's often lag. I have a quad core, the ui should not be this laggy for a browser.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

the nightly now says 4.0b8pre

so beta 7 should be soon

[chrisdoland]

They should have a dedicated group of testers and forum not open to the public. When I read headlines like "Things I hate about Mozilla Firefox 4.0" on sites like AskVG, it's time to pull public testing. Why would you let ALPHA builds out to test publicly? The public is not intelligent enough to test half baked software and "give constructive input to the developers" and not flame it on every blog and forum. No one likes the looks? You must have forgot all the hard work software writers have done to create a website at Mozilla called THEMES & ADDONS. Have you ever liked the default look of any browser? I sure haven't, there all butt ugly. Great thing you can make it look like you want, isn't it?

[tensegrity]

Can you really make Firefox look good in Linux though ?

[vajlent]

Does anyone know what background/wallpaper that have been used on these screenshots?

Thanx ;)

[Sub_Zero_Alchemist]

oh hey is beta 7 skipped?

Nope,Beta 7 is still planned on being released. whatever they finishing on fixing those 15 beta 7 blockers.

Yeah they need to work on the responsiveness of the UI the most. Does anyone else feel the UI is very laggy compared to all the competing browsers? Even compared to firefox 3.x. The whole UI often becomes unresponsive for a second when loading groups of tabs. Chrome and opera do not do this. Chrome and opera also have much smoother tab open and close animation, firefox's often lag. I have a quad core, the ui should not be this laggy for a browser.

Yea i get that as well, it gotten so annoying with the lagging i had to switch to opera,chrome until Beta 7 is released. the ui shouldn't be that laggy at all those issues should of been fixed in the previous beta's ,hopefully those issues will be fixed in the soon to be release beta 7.

[chrisdoland]

Can you really make Firefox look good in Linux though ?

Good? Maybe not, but not repulsive. Depends greatly on what desktop environment and what distro. I actually like firefox in Ubuntu with a few addons like omnibar. I use 7x86 primarily, so when I use linux my preference is gnome. Kde is so close to Windows in shine and attraction that theres no point in dual booting it. Firefox integrates perfectly into each of there themes, you just have to like the look of linux.

[chrisdoland]

Firefox may be slower in development, but their also focused on a more complex architecture that expands user control and eases the addition of millions of available features and customizations, all through a few clicks. No other browser offers everything that Firefox does, that's why it's still used more than Chrome & Opera, even though it's not as fast. Can you imagine the headache the developers have trying to maintain cross platform compatibility? I really feel for those people!

[DesGaiZu]

that's why it's still used more than Chrome & Opera

Chrome is catching fast and firefox market share is dropping, I love firefox for its add ons but other browsers add ons are getting pretty good I just hope they sort v4 out soon.

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

As of today's nightly the progress bars in the address bar (active tab)/on top of the tab (inactive tab) are gone. Instead there is a throbber again. See screenshot:

[TheJudge]

As of today's nightly the progress bars in the address bar (active tab)/on top of the tab (inactive tab) are gone. Instead there is a throbber again. See screenshot:

that looks incredibly nice compared to the ugly progress bars - specially the black ones i had :s

[.Kompressor]

So when is the final coming out already ?

[Boeing 787]

I liked the progress bar. It was one of my favorite things with Firefox 4.

[bogas04]

There is a difference between our development and Chrome etc development , they dont really care about version numbers , but we do ,like Opera 10 wasnt that fast ,but Opera 10.5 was , and likeways , chrome never thought of numbers sincerely lol , but Firefox does , and the thing is , they are building an engine too, Gecko 2.0 , so they have think wisely , but then this is also true that we dont have many developers , we are open source anyways , u have a patch , send it :D

But with Chrome etc , its like , u do this , u do that , its not "we will do this" , that's the difference i guess

Whatever it is, i love firefox and its method of development, though slow , but gr8

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

So when is the final coming out already ?

At this rate in early 2011 - probably after IE 9 final.

[mNiosu]

I liked the progress bar. It was one of my favorite things with Firefox 4.

Try THIS ! ;)

[mNiosu]

Sorry 4 double post.

Also try THIS or THIS if you want it fission-like ! ;)

[Kyang]

As of today's nightly the progress bars in the address bar (active tab)/on top of the tab (inactive tab) are gone. Instead there is a throbber again. See screenshot:

I didn't get that until I disabled Tabmix plus. Apparently that extension breaks everything from the tab scrolling animations to throbbers. If anyone knows of a good alternative that gives me at least most of the functionality of TMP, feel free to send me a PM.

I think the throbber looks surprisingly good, and does a much better job of showing activity than the loading bars ever did. It didn't help that they were kind of easy to miss at first, and sort of blended into each other when there were a lot of tabs loading at once.