Three years ago, Firefox 3 set the record for most downloads in a 24-hour period, cracking 8 million and positioning itself as a viable alternative to Internet Explorer.
Firefox 4 released today to the public at large after 12 public betas, two release candidates, and nearly a year of development, faces a hugely different landscape. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser. And in less than three years, a significant chunk of the browser market has taken a shine to relative newcomer Google Chrome.
You can get Firefox 4 here.
Click here to see the download tracker.
Is it as slow and buggy as 3?
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I use Firefox but I’ll put off the upgrade at least a few weeks till the first batch of bugs found In The Wild are fixed.
It seems faster to me but doesn’t look all that different.
Not in any rush to upgrade. Would rather have other folks find the problems first.
I am waiting for the portable version that I can run from my thumb drive.
For the last year, about the time I upgraded to Win 7 and Firefox and got a Logitech Mouse because the M$ mouse kept breaking every 2.5 years, the ability of my mouse to smoothly HIGHLIGHT and then do commands has been erratic. Something keeps interfering and I have to make 5-6 attempts to get the words I want highlighted. Can’t even play “Sugar” as a flash game because when I draw a line it comes out half a line, or a bunch of dashes.
I keep playing with all the settings. As it so happens, read this morning that some people claim its caused by Firefox/Tools/Advanced==make sure “smooth scrolling” is checked. That does seem to help–but not totally. It acts like there is a conflict somewhere as it hesitates and stalls. I was hoping a quad core with 8GB of Ram would take care of it—but no joy. No problems at all thru win XP.
So, I’ll upgrade to FF 4.0 and hope it gets fixed without breaking two other MORE THAN BASIC expectations.
#6 You might want to try it without plug ins. Some anti malware programs can also wreck you. Been there and done that.
I did a reinstall on my last machine and I’m pretty sure it was plug in from AVG messing me up based on what I learned after the fact.
I am now running Fox 4. I still haven’t gone with IE 9. 32 on IE is supposed to nice but the 64 is supposed to be a bit of a dog. I am running 64 on this machine with 9 gig of ram. I’ll find out later.
Quite nice, a lot cleaner, more organized, and a whole lot faster startup on dual cores XP / Vista. Even this site loads faster.
Animation and sound is better. Several add ons now put their buttons on the toolbar with the URL window, very helpful.
Perhaps when the add-on support is up to snuff.
I like it just fine. Silly me, no bitching.
Can anyone confirm if NoScript works fine please?
I also understood that it would do tab grouping. Is this the case? e.g. have a tab called ForSale and have various tabs within it
Well it seems not to be the CPU hog that 3.x was.
I used to run one-and-half cores ragged and hot.
It got so bad that I switched to Google Chrome.
Now my MacBook Pro is nice and quiet.
I really don’t know if I’ll switch back. (Then again, I’ve got Chrome, FireFox, Opera and Safari on my task bar.)
Noticeably faster. Well done.
Not bad….
I miss the location of the tab bar v.s. the URL bar (I suppose I can change that). Otherwise I like it. Faster loading so far on two machines – the “test” will be an old XP box (about 1ghz but small HD) that’s been a bear with FF3.x.
Price is right anyway 😀 ….
# 11 rcool said, on March 22nd, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Can anyone confirm if NoScript works fine please?
No script works fine and puts a new button up on the toolbar.
7–do-well==plug ins huh? I’ve got a few==everything from pdf to weatherbug. Well, I’ll pay attention this time.
Thanks.
Still slower than Safari, IMHO.
I got it. The download tracker is fun to watch. Africa seems to be a dark continent.
Firefox is pretty amazing — not just the product but the fact that Mozilla can compete against Microsoft and Google with such a widely used program. It’s a triumph, really.
I’m sticking with chrome anyway. not much compels me to go back to FF.
According to a review I saw, they’ve finally fixed a persistent memory leak that had long plagued Firefox. I’ve seen FF3 taking up nearly a full GB of RAM after long sessions on my machine, and the only cure was to restart Firefox. If that’s finally fixed, it’s a plus, but I won’t give them any extra points for fixing old buggy code.
But finally Firefox 4 plays HTML5 video, and this is actually good for iPhone and iPad users even if they never use Firefox. This latest version will further facilitate the transition on the web from Flash to HTML5 video, growing the amount of video that’s available to Apple iUsers, and they can become even more smug than before (if that’s possible).
A smug iUser is a happy iUser 😉
I’ll miss one plugin until it’s updated — BBCode. I used it all the time.
Got it. Like it.
My Google-free system runs great.
If I encounter any problems, I am sure I can overcome them. Firefox versions get pretty well Beta tested before a new release hits the ‘net.
Yes, me too 1873 Colt, I’m Google free and at peace.
Piece of shit doesn’t seem to want to give me seperate stop and reload buttons. Off to find a painless way to downgrade back to 3.
They finally added Paste & Go.
I use Gogoduck because the duck is cute. I think it is Bing in disguise, but ignorance is bliss.
Google’s motto, “Do no evil” is ominous. Why would they even think it necessary to say that……..?
From a customizing standpoint it seems very buggy. 3 attempts to install an adon that restores a feature they removed. I guess that’s why they make the big bucks. Not quite time to switch to ie9 or chrome but close.
It feels slightly faster than Chrome to me, but that could just be trickery.
I prefer the add ons available for FF, but am sad to say I now much prefer the look of Chrome. I hate the auto-updates of Chrome, and that it chokes on animated gifs.
I just get a bad feeling using Chrome, not enough to ever use Safari though. Google already knows enough about me without using their browser.