FireFox 4

I have a message from Mozilla inviting me to update to FireFox 4.

If I am content with my FireFox 3.6.17, are there any compelling reasons for me to update? Or, as seems more likely, are there compelling reasons for me not to update?

I am not a fan of changing things just because they can be changed (which seemed to me to be the driving force behind XP --> Vista). I'm of the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" school. Hell, I'd still be using Ami Pro for word processing if someone had ever ported it over to 16 or 32 bit. But, on the chance that FireFox 4 is really and truly wonderful and not to be missed out on, I thought I'd ask here.

tanstaafl.

I'm wondering about the state of plug-in compatibility when going from FF3 --> FF4. Tough to know without taking the leap, though.

I think I'll dig out my spare notebook, boot with my special RAM overlay, and try it out there. Then just power-off to revert to the old version.

I'm pretty happy with FF4. It's definitely faster.
I did have to do a couple of tweaks to get it back to what I was used to seeing in FF3, though.
I think I outlined them in the FF4 thread.
http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/343658/FireFox_4_0#Post343658

Looks like a Bad Idea for me here:

Well, that was exciting.

I backed up my firefox installation, and my .mozilla directory, and then upgraded to FF4.
Tabs are completely b0rked. I get lots of little "new tab" tabs, but cannot navigate to them or anything.

Needs Work. Call me in 6 months.

(reverted to backups now)

MMm... seems to be the Tab History add-on that b0rked it. With that disabled, FF4 at least functions.
But I absolutely require Tab History functionality.. time to go hunting..

EDIT: Mmm.. something in there is giving me Tab History functionality already, without the add-on. So that one's good.

Now to check out the other missing add-ons.

Okay, it's working well enough to be a keeper for me here.

I had to override add-on compatibility checking to get ClearURL re-renabled (works fine), and HeaderControl and LiveHeaders are currently not compatible.

But everything else that matters seems to work.
And yes, it does seem quicker.. not sure why.

Having the text-entry field resizing was alone worth the ugprade to FF4 for me. Right now, I can grab the corner of the text entry box that I'm typing this into and resize it to any size I want. Very very useful.

I'm also happy that FF4 seems to be even faster and handles lots of freshly-opened tabs better.

I worked around all my other FF4 upgrade gripes and I'm quite happy with FF4. My upgrade gripes were:

- My Zoom Toolbar did not work in FF4. I have worked around this by replacing it with "Zoom Page 2.2", which I like even better.

- My favorite behavior from Tab Mix Plus, which was: Double click on a blank area of the tabbar to open a new tab, did not work in FF4. Because the tabs, even when moved down to their proper place, were still considered part of the titlebar, a doubleclick on the blank tabbar maximized the window instead of opening a new tab. I worked around this by turning on the old-school main menu feature in FF4, which acts as the dividing line between the tabbar and the titlebar, thus making all the old Tab Mix Plus features work exactly as before. I hated the lack of an old-school main menu anyway, and so that actually killed two birds with one stone.

Other than that, I haven't seen too much plugin incompatibility, but I don't use a gigantic amount of plugins anyway. I've pretty much got all the important plugins I had from the prior FF version, and I'm happy.

Let me strengthen that statement. Our company has a web-based internal bug filing system that I use many times per day. Its default text boxes are way too small, and so now I use this feature many times per day and it reduces headaches significantly. So much so, that now I consider FF4 indispensable in my daily work.

Yes. Firefox. As it has back at least to the beginning of Firefox 3. And which I've been trying to convince you of for at least as long.

Mmm.. new behaviour: clicking on links from Google News now opens them in new tabs, rather than re-using the same tab.

I wonder why that is?

I don't see that functionality here. Oh, bottom right corner only, just like Mac OS 9.

Okay, where'd the Refresh/Reload button disappear to ???

Actually, when I right-click to "Customize" the toolbar, it re-appears while editing, and then vanishes again as soon as I click "Done". WTF?

I would assume it's merely to make sure that at some point you see Google News again, if only to close the tab that remained open.

I'm divided on this practice, especially on sites like Google News. On the one hand, if I read Google News, this is probably how I'd read stories anyway. I'd open new tabs for all the stories I'd want to read, close the Google News tab, and go about my reading.

On the other hand, I'm a fan of choice, and all but the novice web surfer knows the tricks like Ctrl-click and middle-clicking to open new tabs, which would open the stories behind the current tab instead of in front of like it works now...

I have it on mine, but I can't remember how I got it. I think on a vanilla install, it used to be on the right of the... uh... "awesome bar", but I moved it to the left next to the back/forward buttons.

When I customize, by bar changes to show back, forward, refresh, stop. When I click done in the customize box, the stop disappears, and the reload and stop buttons are turned into a combo of the two, so that when a page is loading, I get the stop button, and when it's done loading, I get a refresh button.

Okay, just a bug in the "Customize toolbar" thing. Once I quit and then started firefox again, it worked.

Speaking of which.. I used to have a "Restart Firefox" entry under the File menu.. gone. I wonder how to get that back?

The links on Google News all carry the target="_blank" attribute, so I think the browser is doing what it's supposed to. I never noticed this behaviour, as I always middle clicked the links to get them to open in new tabs, anyway.

Oops.. my mistake, FF4 does NOT have the functionality from TabHistory after all. That's a biggie for me.

I'll hunt around some more before reverting, though.

Ahh.. found the replacement:
"Tab History Redux" works with FF4.

And there's also a "Restart Firefox" add-on to put "Restart" back onto the File menu.

Life is good again.

Fixed. Had to go to about:config and then set browser.link.open_newwindow to "1".

Obvious, really.

Oh, for those (Bitt) still wondering what the fuss was about, try this:

Right-click and "Open Link in New Tab" the "Empeg FAQ" above.
Then, in that new tab, hit the "Back" button.

By default, nothing happens.
But with Tab History Redux installed, it takes you back here.

Cheers

Doesn't that leave you with two tabs both displaying empegbbs.com? Or does the back button end up closing the new tab, restoring the initial tab to the front?

Yes, that's the point. The two are equivalent. When a web site gives you two or more options for how to proceed, you can do them all in different tabs, then close all the tabs you aren't interested in -- without fearing that you've lost the "magic" one with the history going back before the choices page.

Galeon always worked like this (and I'm tempted to say that Fresco did too, but can't really remember); Firefox 3 needed an add-on.

Peter

I couldn't figure out how to get FF4 to stop complaining about ClearURL (works fine with compatibility checking globally disabled), so I hunted around and found the modern replacement for it:

KonqueFox.

Works well --> gives the option of adding various Konqueror style buttons to the toolbar, including the "clear URL" button, an "Up" button, and "magnify" buttons.

Another keeper.

Ahh, ok. I've tended to handle that by opening all the links in the background, keeping the first tab in the list as the source tab to go back to later. Lately I've been using more trackpad gestures for back, and was hoping that the second method was how the add-on worked. I've had a few times where I swipe back, only to have nothing happen due to being in a new tab.

This is the great thing about modern browsers and add-ons, it's pretty easy to create a very custom web workflow that meets the demands of the users, without trying to overload the stock browser with a million checkboxes.

Mark-
For text readability and image resizing I'm using a combination of NoSquint and Image Zoom.
Easy access to zoom up/down text alone or text and images, or deal with images alone (kind of nice for Craigslist Ads).

Well, for zooming both text+images together: that's a built-in function of firefox (ctrl-+, ctrl--, ctrl-0). NoSquint merely adds buttons for it to the toolbar, same as Konquefox.

But I do use ImageZoom for zooming images by themselves.
Cheers

Ah so! I didn't realize NoSquint was superfluous. Perhaps I've been using it since before zooming was an option on FF? More than likely I just didn't know...
So, FF also keeps track of the zoom settings per site?

Hmm... a little bit more than buttons, NoSquint also gives you a pop-up slider bar doohickey. lol that really sells it!

I upgraded to FF4 over the weekend. I hate the new UI. It seems like they changed stuff just to change stuff, without any reason for it. It took me forever to find the refresh button, and the first two things I had to do was revert back to menu mode and move the tabs to the bottom. I didn't think about moving the refresh button from the right of the location bar, but will probably do that when I get home.

Chrome has had this feature for some time. It's definitely handy.

Proportional whole-page zooming came in FF3. I don't know if it can track this on a per-site basis though. That would be a very nice addition to Safari though.

My FF4 changes-
* re-arrange button bar (customize) Back/Forward - new tab - home - refresh/stop - address - (delete google search) - various add-on buttons
* FF3 look-alike theme (return to good looking buttons, basically)
* tabs on bottom (tabs adjacent to pages)

Can't think of what else I did just now, but after doing that much things were pretty much back to normal for me.
It wasn't hard to do these quick customizations and shouldn't stop anyone from enjoying FF4 vs. FF3.

The one thing that I absolutely must do on every FF4 install is to install Status 4 Evar to bring back the status bar. The goofy pseudo pop-up status display is ugly and annoying. No idea why they changed this.

Because Chrome did it. And both browsers annoy me with that at work, where the status bar likes to pop up over UI elements in a few of our web based dashboards.

The Chrome way seems to be the motivation behind a lot of recent Firefox changes lately, including the amazing growing version number. Chrome is up to 11 now, with 12 expected in a few months. Firefox expects to be at version 7 by the end of the year. Would be nice to see browsers try and differentiate themselves, not all become the same thing from different groups.

The pop-up status bar notice will move to the opposite side of the window if you mouse over it.
That doesn't address the issue of wanting to *see* what's under it without mouse action, but if you have the status bar solidly taking up space you wouldn't be able to see that part of the page anyway.

I'm not that bothered by the missing status bar, but there were some status messages that I liked to see. I'm getting used to not needing to see them.

Yeah, Chrome became a competitive browser by not trying to be Firefox. Firefox will cease to be a competitive browser if it keeps trying (and miserably failing) to be Chrome.

Both FF3 and FF4 do track this setting per-site, for me here at least. Nice.

And the missing status bar at the bottom is a godsend for small screens, like netbooks and android devices. Still, there ought to be a checkbox in View-->Toolbars to toggle it (there isn't).

Cheers

I fear that extension developers will drop support for statusbar icons since it's no longer there by default, and it takes more than a simple toggle to turn it back on. For now, I've only lost one such icon: Greasemonkey's.

I've had to reconfigure AdBlock+ to show it's icon up top rather than in the (missing) status bar.