Why Firefox 4 Is Winning the Browser Battle

PC World ^ | 03/23/2011 | Katherine Noyes

[OldDeckHand]

Microsoft may have seen fit to boast about the 2.35 million downloads its new Internet Explorer 9 browser received in its first 24 hours, but Mozilla's Firefox 4 has since essentially blown such figures out of the water.

In fact, not only did Firefox 4 claim a million downloads in its first three hours and almost 7 million in its first day--surpassing by far Internet Explorer 9--but by Wednesday, the day after its official release, it had already claimed almost 2 percent of the worldwide Internet browser market, according to research firm StatCounter.

[Straight Vermonter]

It is incorporated into your browser. It does it's thing automatically. If you don't have it already download greasemonkey. After you have that you can download any of the addons at usercripts.org

I have scripts that modify google, facebook, flickr, netflix, imdb, youtube, wikipedia and on and on. It's nice to have webpages work like you want them to.

[catnipman]

Wonder if FF4 fixed the fatal memory leaks that have continuously worsened with every version? No matter what I do mine eventually consumes over 500MB and then drops dead after about 30 minutes of intense browsing. Tried every trick in the book. Nothing works. Nothing.

I wouldn’t even consider using FF if it wasn’t for a hand full of extremely useful addons.

[Cyber Liberty]

I have the Tree View. It’s not as cool as this.

[VeniVidiVici]

You mean your FF3 "magically" upgraded itself to FF4? That would be strange. I had to actually go the the FF site to download it, even though I have automatic updates enabled.

Nope. I went to download FF3 and somehow ended up with FF4. Obviously I clicked on the wrong link but as many times as I've downloaded FF3 before, strange how I haven't downloaded one for the wrong platform by mistake. Now they are pushing FF4 and viola! I end up with it.

Don't want it. Don't need it.

[skr]

I just right-click in a blank spot on the page and choose “Reload” from the resulting menu.

[skr]

Ani-weather is my favorite add-on. FF has only stopped working a few times over the past few months, and I do a lot of browsing. I was having problems with printing from web pages with IE but not with FF.

[Politicalmom]

Every time I upgrade I get new problems. This time things won’t full load, sometimes I get odd fonts until I refresh again, and it’s constantly crashing.

I tolerate the problems because of the addons, though.

[Politicalmom]

Do you have the FEBE addon? It saves your Firefox settings automatically.

[buck61]

there isn’t an ad-blocker that is half as good as the worst one available for FF.

Same here.

I down loaded the new FF 4.0 onto an older XP, doubled the speed.
Used the MS OS 9 on a new lap-top, no improvement. Installed the FF 4.0, much faster surfing and more stable. Like the Ghostery in FF 4.0

[OldDeckHand]

"This time things won’t full load, sometimes I get odd fonts until I refresh again, and it’s constantly crashing."

I was having similar problems, especially with fonts on the built-in text editor. My son turned off (in the options-advanced tab under "browsing") "use hardware acceleration when available". The thing works fine now.

It might be something worth trying.

[ken in texas]

I just discovered something about the missing buttons for "Reload" and "Stop".

I generally have the menu bar show small icons only. When I go to customize the view, the buttons are shown but disappear when I click "Done". If I select "Icons and Text" or "Text", the buttons remain visible.

Very strange.

[Tainan]

FEBE?
I reckon I don't. I'll look into that. Thanks for the tip.

[OldDeckHand]

That is strange. My buttons are where they were in my prior installation of FF3. I did, however, customize those buttons on that build, and FF4 remembered their placement. When I installed FF4, it didn't have the "new" combined stop/reload button.

The only thing I had to change after the FF4 install, was to move my tabs back down below the URL bar. Other than that, and a new tab called "feedback" (that I can't seem to get rid of) and the Firefox drop down menu in the upper left, it looks almost identical to FF3.

[Future Snake Eater]

Unfortunately, we run Adobe Connect, so I have to have ActiveX allowed on my network.

[ken in texas]

I happened to notice it when I switched to my wife’s login to make sure all was well with the new Firefox. I have her running with different options and was surprised to see the buttons for the “missing” functions.

[Politicalmom]

I don’t have that choice under browsing, but I’ll keep checking. Thanks for the tip. :)

[Fire_on_High]

It’s faster, but seems to me that the memory leak is both worse and faster also.

That said, first day or two I reloaded it so many times fiddling with addons that it makes it hard to really judge well, and at least one game I play tend to aggressively grab resources, but then at the end gives things back in such a way as to reset memory leaks from everything.

Machine hits 55% resources used without more than the normal load, or gobs of tabs open? Time to load WoW or kill FF and restart it.

[newzjunkey]

To "improve stability" FF4 spins plug-ins off in a separate process. It didn't take long before failure. I was on a site that uses Adobe Flash to deliver video. I killed the browser because it hung yet that separate process did not die. I had to kill it separately.

FF4 is still half-baked. I'll stick with any other browser including the prior version.

[ShadowAce]

[roamer_1]

My only word of warning is that I have noticed text-editor's, like the one FreeRepublic uses, acts a bit strange. You get vertical lines running through the editing box. It's annoying. It's a problem I have on both my PCs - one desktop, one laptop both running 64-bit W7.

I have not noticed that problem - and I am on Win7/64 too...

I mainly have interface complaints:

The Home button and bookmarks on the extreme right is a reach every time, as is the refresh button.

And tabs-on-top is again, more mouse travel than needful - Thankfully that is easily fixed, so my tabs are once again where they belong.

I loaded it onto a legacy box last night... a 2.4 ghz running XP with 1g of ram, where it performed very poorly in comparison to it's previous version. IT FLIES on new hardware, no doubt, but if you are underpowered it is probably best to stick to FF3.