Fun with Firefox

this isnt mac available yet right

it is

ah crap, thats what i was afraid of - my home g5 says its incompatible with my system

Hmm I might give this a go when I get home - does Adblock Plus and Noscript work with the new vers?

can't do it until there's a working favicon picker extension

xp yep

why oh why does the 'connecting' animation spin one way when the 'downloading' animation spins the other?

this is driving me up the wall

Ugh. That mobile version is atrociously slow on my android - nothing comes close to the default browser's performance. Desktop FF4 rules though.

love the new speed / tab candy groups

Two weird things... the intro videos said there was going to be a "Firefox menu button" but I just see the normal File/Edit/View etc. menus at the top.

Also there was going to be a "Bookmark Button" on the top right but I don't seem to have that either.

okay, apparently on XP you have to hide the menu bar to see the Firefox menu button. Got that now.

mmm, and there's no Firefox button on OS X, thank god. Hate that thing.

just don't upgrade FF ffs. It breaks everything! i.e., flash (which I hate anyway) add-ons, etc.

The puny amount of screen real estate you gain by using the Firefox button doesn't make up for the extra steps one has to go through to get to the bookmarks and tools menus.

It's horrible. It's like they ran out of ideas and decided to trumpet a big orange eponymous button that does a load of crap nobody ever cares about. The menu bar was just fine.

There's a bookmark button on the far right. You can move it to the far left through an unintuitive "Options to toolbar layout to physically move the thing" function.

Shit works better once I figured it out. That orange menu path was starting to piss me off.

Firefox 4 is doing weird things to our work CMS, and looks like shit on the office Windows XP system, so I'm either going to reload 3.6 or transfer over to Chrome.

At the office, I used to use Firefox for work, and Chrome for pissing about and procrastinating, but it looks like I'll be doing all of that on Chrome now, and checking into Firefox for Firebug when I need it. Never mind, I guess.

well gave it a shot, hated it. i'll stick with chrome.

I'd use chrome if it had adblockplus and noscript, but it doesnt, so i wont.

adblockplus for chrome

Well thats half the battle.

adblock plus on chrome only hides the ads, it doesn't block them. If that sort of thing matters to you.

These back & forward buttons being text is freaking me out!

Is there a consensus on the worthiness of upgrading from FF3 to FF4 yet?

yes, do it.

yah i like 4, it seems fast and app tabs are sweet

I think it's great. A major improvement.

i kinda hate it? still feels buggy and unintuitive to me.

It is very crashy, at least in the short time I've been running it

Tech forums Ive been on have universally raged about it, but that may be more to do with the fact the UI was messed with/moved around. which causes headaches for helpdesk types.

^^^ Preferences is now in Firefox-orange-button > 'Options' > 'Options', Add-ons has it's own separate menu, yada yada yada. If you were annoyed (as I was) when they changed the 'view Downloads list' hotkey from ctrl+Y to ctrl+J for apparently no reason, then you're going to be fuming at FF4.

No crashes here though. One lockup yesterday evening that I had to kill with the Task Manager, but I'm putting that down to Win7 being crap at managing resources after a PC has been on for a few hours.

App Tabs are a neat idea, but the one page I've used it for, my ISPs webmail interface, doesn't auto-update. Still useful to have it as a not-easily-closeable tab though.

It's still significantly slower than Chrome ime.

Killer feature IMO is tab groups

done with it (and opera, chrome...) IE9.

really :o

Switching to Chrome has confirmed how bloody slow Firefox (for Mac) has become. When you factor in the multiple freezes I was experiencing in 4, I don't think I can go back.

yeah this upgrade really sucked :(

Firefox 5 is due in a couple of weeks! And Firefox 6 in August! It's this new smash-'em-out policy.

I've been doing a lot more with Chrome over the past couple of weeks. Now that the extensions are catching up it's slowly making Firefox redundant for me. And yeah, sick to death of random pauses and youtube videos sucking.

Okay, there's a NoScript equivalent called NotScripts but due to Chrome limitations it's terrible. Back to Firefox.

never tried chrome but feel like i have no choice now, these "crashes" are driving me mad.

Hey, does anyone know whether the new STOP FOLLOWING ME function in Chrome will do away with the need for a javascript blocker?

lol, NotScripts sounds like an addon that blocks everything that ISN'T Javascript

Firefox IE Tab add-on just saved us from a load of hassle tonight - upgraded to IE9 this week and our British Gas Top Up wouldn't work any more because it ONLY works in IE6-8. And we'd run out of gas, and my wife was in the middle of washing her hair. All the shops I know of with a top up machine are closed by now, and I can't seem to find a way of installing IE8 on Windows 7. Found some dude's blog post of how to get around it using Firefox and we have hot water again. This seems like a first world problem?

Seems like a predictable Microsoft dumb shit problem tbh

lol, NotScripts sounds like an addon that blocks everything that ISN'T Javascript

From what I can tell it offers to let through all scripts by default. The single biggest concern I have about that sentence is the "from what I can tell" part. Also, it demands that you set a 20+ letter password in a text file. A TEXT FILE.

my super secret password is "stupidfuckingpassword" btw

To be fair to Microsoft, I think it's British Gas with the problem. I'm pretty sure there is no reason why the page has to be rendered with IE6-8 other than British Gas's shitty software checks the browser version and won't proceed otherwise. I guess could've tried spoofing the user-agent or something but I'm no expert at HTTP programming so just installing a FF add-on was a great solution.

Oh yeah, I know what you mean. 'er indoors uses the Weight Watchers points tracker (she's not overweight fyi coz she uses weight watchers ^__^) which until a few months ago would only run on IE and Netscape. NETSCAPE. We don't have Windows at home so I had to add a user agent to Chrome just so she could access the thing that she pays $40/mth for.

for some reason i can no longer edit/print/work with google docs in firefox - it lets me open the docs but tells me there's a browser error and i need to refresh, except that doesn't do anything.

I am not loving this new interface.

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^^^ that was annoying for the first few days, but I got used to it.