My Brief First Impression On Firefox 4 Beta 1

As I promised earlier, I would make take a week away from my default browser whenever a major release came out from another one. Just released was the first beta of Firefox 4. Since the changes are obvious and pretty major, I am going to briefly discuss them here. Since it is a beta, I really do not want to judge the performance due to its pre-release stage.

The biggest changes come in the area of GUI. Firefox retains the look of the back and forward buttons and a few others, but that’s about it. When compared to Google Chrome and Opera, Firefox is shockingly similar.

From top to bottom is Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. The first thing you’ll notice is Firefox now has tabs on top. Hooray! The light greys with a tint of blue are also common in all three (that Chrome picture is from XP, 7 has aero). They all have a combined refresh and stop button. All three have also combined all the menus into one or two buttons. Opera and Firefox both have on single button in the top left corner. Firefox does not have the button combined with the tab bar, but it still doesn’t take much room. Firefox and Opera both have a search bar (I got rid of it in the Opera picture). I sure with Firefox would combine the two. Overall, they look extremely similar. Firefox has just boosted itself into one of my favorite GUI’s. I’d be happy looking at any of these three all day. In fact, Firefox isn’t its clunky boring self anymore. It feels like a completely different browser that I’m comfortable using.

Firefox has also made a new and improved addons page. On the side offers easy access to your extensions, themes, and plug-ins. It also gives access to a page that “will soon explain what add-ons are, feature some of the best, and help you pick from thousands of ways to customize Firefox.”

Firefox also has a new and improved feedback system. You can access the features from the “Feedback” button. You can take studies to improve Firefox, as well as reporting things that make you happy and sad. This is all anonymous, and you can view other peoples thoughts on the feedback webpage.

As far as performance and speed go, its a little too early to tell because Firefox is only in Beta stage. However, there have been some improvements. Like most browsers focus as of late, Firefox has improved its HTML5 capabilities. It has also improved its ACID3 score, which was 97/100, up from 92/100 last time. While Chrome, Opera, and Safari all receive 100, 97 is pretty close and it A LOT better than Internet Explorer, last tested by me at 12/100. It has included crash protection from Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight plugins, which although not the only thing that cause a crash, they make up a good majority. But beyond these three things, I need to wait for the final release. My memory usage is quite low as well, but without addons this is really too early to tell.

Few addons of course have support at the moment in Firefox 4 (only WOT, Adblock Plus, and NoScript has support out of the MANY I have). However, this will be sure to change when Firefox 4 is officially out. If you want to use the beta and you have an essential addon, simply use the linked Google search which shows many successful methods (these methods work 95% of the time in my experience).

Overall I am excited for the release of version 4. I would honestly like to get back to Firefox due to the addons and great user community, and with a way better GUI, some crash protection, and other improvements, Firefox is certainly more appealing to switch to. The only thing that holds me back from switching is one of the main reasons I switched to Chrome in the first place: speed and performance. If it can become faster and decrease its memory usage (which is good right now without addons), I would probably switch from Opera. However, Firefox will have a lot of work to do because it never competes well in my speed tests.

Advertisement