Why Firefox 4 Is Winning the Browser Battle

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

[OldDeckHand]

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

My son fixed the problem last night. I have no idea what he did, but it's fine now - FYI.

[roamer_1]

Speaking of the forms on here, do you use the user script addon for FreeRepublic? It makes posting much easier.

The box for posting is much larger (about 99% of your screen width) and there are buttons for the most commonly used HTML tags. If you post images or links or just like nicely formatted posts then it is definitely worth downloading.

d000d! This is seriously AWESOME! If just for the added editing space, not to mention any buttons! Why isn't this broadly advertised here somehow?

Thank you so very much!

[Tribune7]

Some of my extensions didn’t upgrade but everything else turned out fine for my switch.

[antiRepublicrat]

Using it on my Mac right now, pretty sweet. Even less incentive to move to Safari.

[rdb3]

At first, it seemed kind of sparse but once I got the hang of it, I came to appreciate the simplicity of it.

Ditto. Chrome is better than I thought it would be.

If you can't appreciate the pure beauty of the violin after hearing this, something's wrong with your ears.

[Quix]

Indeed. Beautiful sound; beautiful music.

Thx.

[papasmurf]

I wouldn't care if Bill Gates and his entire IE team served me Earl Grey and Biscotti each morning for a month, I'll not install anything MS that I don't absolutely need, and can't find a Linux version of.

Firefox rox!

[Tatze]

Not sure what happened with your install. But because of your post, I tested the upgrade on my work laptop (which is getting replaced next week anyway). It had add-ons and plug-ins as well as a few bookmarks.

After the upgrade, all bookmarks are still there, all add-ons are still there, although a few were not compatible, but were still listed with a note that they will upgrade when there is a compatible version.

So far, all seems to be working fine with 4.0.

[Styria]

Firefox has a larger core of dedicated (fanatic?) users, but a smaller group of users overall. So of course it would outstrip IE on first-day downloads. But given time they’ll be exceeded again, because there’s just plain more people using IE.

[Tainan]

Thats good to hear. Despite my rant I am a Firefox fan. I like it and the add-ons and stuff it has to offer.

Once it gets more “broken-in” I may try 4.0 again. But I’m still P.O’ed about he bkmrks and things I lost in my attempt at the upgrade.

[zeugma]

I’m using the 64-bit and 32-bit versions on different computers. Both seem to be working ok. I wish Mozilla released official 64-bit versions for Linux. It’s a pain to have to go hunt it down.

[zeugma]

The best FR addon for FF is the Xinha editor. It's totally wysiwyg and produces nice, clean html.

[steve86]

I going to guess you have seen the light of doing BACKUPS.

Lots of ways to accomplish that. For example, I export Firefox bookmarks, and email them to myself. Also sync them. Also the ordinary home directory backups (which will include the add-on configurations). Also image backups to memory sticks.

[free_life]

I am now in a wait and see (more research)before going to 4 from 3.6.15. I don’t want to go thru what Tainan did.

What OS are you two using?

[zeugma]

I never have FF lock up and I’ll let it run for weeks, if not occasionally months without restarting it. It uses a lot of ram, but that’s primarily because of the way pages are cached. There are some config (about:config) changes you can make to affect how that operates. Maybe it’s because I’m running Linux that it is so much more stable.

[CharacterCounts]

Upgraded on my home computer and was surprised when many of my addons were disabled?I’m Going to wait on to upgrade my office PC until the FF4 addon set becomes more robust.

[Straight Vermonter]

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

[Tainan]

Win XP Pro..all of the updates in place.

Stever86, thanks for the tip on how to back-up bkmrks. Will be useful...in the future.

[ken in texas]

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

If you go to "View" / "Toolbars" / "Customize..." you should be able to drag the buttons to a position you prefer. I still can't get some buttons to display when selecting "small icons" without text, but you should be able to reposition them.

[RayChuang88]

While I welcome Firefox 4.0's dramatic speed increase over Firefox 3.6.15, there's one gigantic downside: many add-ons no longer work.  It could be at least a month before most add-ons are upgraded to Firefox 4.0-compatible versions.

By the way, the hardware acceleration for Firefox 4.0 under Windows XP is not really that great, due to the limitations of the Windows XP memory management and display driver design. However, under Windows Vista and Windows 7, the hardware acceleration does work very effectively with the more modern memory management and better display drivers of the more modern Windows versions, making it just about as fast as Google Chrome 10.0.648.204 (the current version) in many operations.