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Firefox 4 Released!

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What's New and Awesome in Firefox 4

medium_ff4.jpgWindows/Mac/Linux: Firefox 4 is officially out, and it's got a lot going for it, including a more minimalistic interface, synchronization, and a serious speed increase. Here's what you have to look forward to in Firefox 4.

 

 

Speed

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One of the biggest complaints people make about Firefox is, luckily, one of the biggest improvements in Firefox 4: its speed. Firefox is much faster than it was before, whether we're talking JavaScript performance (using its new Jägermonkey engine), startup times, or graphics. We'll have our own speed tests out soon, but Mozilla's boasting that it's three to six times faster than its predecessors—which is pretty believable once you take this thing for a spin. Even if you ran the beta back in the summertime, you'll want to check it out again—it's improved remarkably even since the earlier versions. It's also worth noting that it's integrated a BarTab-like feature into the browser that loads your focused tab first when you restore a session. Then it starts loading the others, so they're ready when you switch to them. That way, you can get right to browsing and it will load your other tabs as you work on that first page, without crashing under the load of trying to render a million tabs at once.

 

 

Minimalistic Interface

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Mozilla knows you love tabbed browsing, and it shows in Firefox 4. Some of the biggest feature improvements have to do with how you manage your tabs, not the least of which is the great Tab Panorama organization window. It's basically a little window that shows a visual layout of your open tabs and lets you organize them by task (or into a handy to-do list). You can even open only one group at a time, so Firefox saves your other groups but doesn't clutter your tab bar with them.

 

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As if that weren't enough, they've also added a few other handy features. You can now "pin" tabs like you can in Google Chrome, which sends a tab to the left side of your tab bar as a tiny, favicon-only tab for those sites you keep open all the time (adding also to the minimalistic, space-saving interface mentioned above). You can also search for an open tab in Firefox's address bar and switch to it, saving you from opening up tabs you already have and making it quicker to jump to them.

 

 

 

 

 

Firefox Sync

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Firefox Sync brings password, bookmark, history, open tab, and setting synchronization to Firefox. I'm not about to leave the comfort of the cross-browser Xmarks and LastPass for most of that, but this is a pretty nice feature for the preference syncing alone. Now, when you get a new computer or do a reinstall, you don't have to setup Firefox the way you like it—all your preferences will be immediately synced there. Bonus: if you're using Firefox mobile on Android or Maemo, you'll be able to sync all that info to your mobile device too, which is fantastic.

 

 

Other Improvements

Those are some of the biggest additions to Firefox 4, but it's certainly not all. Firefox is also stepping up its game with support for the WebM video format, full hardware acceleration for better graphics, plugin sandboxing for better crash protection, extra privacy protection, and increased HTML5 and CSS3 support. For the full list of new features, be sure to check out Mozilla's introduction page, or download it and take it for a spin yourself. And, if you've got a favorite new feature, let us know what it is and why in the comments. And, if you find that you have incompatible add-ons, you can try and get them working with Mozilla's Add-On Compatibility Reporter.

 

Firefox 4 Homepage Download Link

 

Source

 

What do you think guys? I'm suprised we didn't have a big topic on this like we did for FF3. I just today found out it even came out, with FF3 I knew a week ahead of time!

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I was using the Beta up until now, didn't realize it was released already. O_O this is awesome

 

So happy about the pin feature, i used to just have firefox save all my tabs on closing and startup.

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Same with me too. And I didn't think I would really use the grouped tabs but I've already had a use for it, so I'm quite happy so far. And I'm liking how sleek it is, I could tell that webpages seemed a little bigger right off.

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And the speed man, my god the speed.

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I've been using the beta too!

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And the speed man, my god the speed.

 

Before I re-came into this thread I was thinking how I would talk about the speed. Yes the speed is fucking good. A "speed brag" that actually seems legitimate.

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What do you guys think of the pin-tabs? I don't really like them too much.

 

The only good things i can think of are that it makes your tab space larger, and it saves tabs for next time.

 

I don't really like how you can change the website like you can a normal tab, because I often forget that the tab is pinned and i'll quickly change it to check my school website, and forget I did that. I was kind of hoping it would be like an actual semi-permanent tab that you can't change the link for, unless you edit it.

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I personally love the pinned tabs, as I have a set of tabs which I have open at all times and don't change at any time. (eg. Gmail, Yahoo, Ghoztcraft, Facebook, etc etc).

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What do you guys think of the pin-tabs? I don't really like them too much.

 

The only good things i can think of are that it makes your tab space larger, and it saves tabs for next time.

 

I don't really like how you can change the website like you can a normal tab, because I often forget that the tab is pinned and i'll quickly change it to check my school website, and forget I did that. I was kind of hoping it would be like an actual semi-permanent tab that you can't change the link for, unless you edit it.

 

Sounds like you just aren't used to them yet. So I would wait until you have more of a habbit of not messin with the pinned tabs before you make up for mind fully on them. I'm diggin them I have 3 things usually open so it's really helped to have them already be open/take up less room for other stuff.

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The tab grouping has completely changed how I use my browser at work.

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But in Google Chrome, you can already group tabs and save them as tabbed bookmarks o_o

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But in Google Chrome, you can already group tabs and save them as tabbed bookmarks o_o

 

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Whoops, I accidentally minus reped your post.. how do I remove that..lol

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So Firefox is finaly up to par with all the other browsers. Took them long enough, can't say i know anyone that still uses Firefox.

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So Firefox is finaly up to par with all the other browsers. Took them long enough, can't say i know anyone that still uses Firefox.

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So Firefox is finaly up to par with all the other browsers. Took them long enough, can't say i know anyone that still uses Firefox.

 

I sure hope your trolling.

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No I'm not, Firefox is the last browser to reach current standards. It's market share has droped significantly as chrome has taken the market. Frankly i don't even consider installing it anymore to test websites I'm building :\

 

I only test IE9, Chrome 12, Safari 5, and sometimes Opera (Thats what my phone user's as a browser).

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Oh please, we all know you're an IE user. IE is just now getting into the html5 game with hardware acceleration. Chrome is still years away from getting the addon database that firefox has. That extra optional functionality from the addons is a game breaker for me. Firefox has been at the "bar-setter" for some time now.

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I personally like the changes that firefox four has. Even though I was very late to download and was using an older version. The improvements are noticeable

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I don't require that many add-ons to my browser. wtf.png

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Its not the amount of add-ons that people have installed. Its the number of add-ons available.

 

There is a Firefox add-on for just about ANYTHING you need. Personally I only use two add-ons: ABP (Ad block plus) and Unplug. (For downloading flash games.)

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I use ABP (Adblock), Cooliris + CoolPreviews (Previewing links, image viewer), CYW (Script and in-website ediotr), FastestFox (Features such as endless pages on scroll down, mouseover, etc), FFShowCase (Tab Viewer), FlashGot (Gives you download links to every item on the page), Personas (Skins), Greasemonkey (Javascript website improvements), Read It Later (Like bookmarks but not as permanent and easier to manage), StumbleUpon (Random site viewing based on tags).

 

Addons make the experience a lot more personal, not to mention easier to use.

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I don't even know the names of some of the add-ons I use. There's one to make the address bar a search engine browser with various commands, there's another which is basically all the tab-related keyboard shortcuts with mouse button combinations. And I have ABP and something to download youtube videos.

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