Firefox 4, which debuted yesterday, is going great guns.
The browser has already been downloaded 7.15 million times (as of 12:39PM ET on 3/22/2011) including, of course, by the nonpareil SI.
Faster, Better
The folks at Mozilla, the non-profit foundation that develops the open source browser, say Firefox 4 is two to six times faster than the previous releases.
Major enhancements to the JavaScript engine are said to make everything from startup time to page load speed to graphics and JavaScript performance “screaming fast” in Firefox 4.
In our tests, the browser did seem to load fast although we’d be skeptical of the “screaming fast” hyperbole.
Cool Look
The latest version of Firefox features a sleek, minimalist look that lets the web content take center stage.
There is an Orange tab on the top extreme left with drop-down box for the various options.
A convenient browser button on the right makes it easy to manage all your bookmarks and an asterisk inside the browser bar enables one-click bookmarking.
A Panorama feature lets you put your tabs into groups (we haven’t tried it yet).
For the full list of features in Firefox 4, click here.
Guys, if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 4 yet, click on the button below and we promise you even a Bollywood item number won’t give you as much joy over the long term as the Firefox upgrade. 😉
Firefox 4 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 80 languages.
The upgrade is scheduled to be available on Android and Maemo devices soon.
Firefox also offers hundreds of thousands of add-ons, extensions and Personas.
A new Firefox Add-ons Manager is said to make it easy for users to manage and discover add-ons to customize their web experience.
So far, we haven’t explored Firefox add-ons much. But we intend to do so in the coming weeks.
Go ahead, guys. Download Firefox 4 now. Show Internet Explorer the middle finger.
Have You Schmucks Firefoxed 4 Yet? added by SearchIndia.com on
View all posts by SearchIndia.com →
what about google chrome?
SearchIndia.com Responds:
We don’t use it.
Not in favor of one company dominating multiple sectors.
We’re FireFoxians!
I had used the 4 beta for sometime.. It kept freezing. Deinstalled it.
I installed the IE 9.. it seems to be more stable than FF 4 beta.
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Haven’t downloaded IE 9. No plans to.
Apparently, IE 9 doesn’t work with Windows XP (which we have on our netbooks and on a couple of older desktops).
Have had Firefox 4 for a few hours. No issues. Betas, of course, are still work in progress.
My favourite add-on, Firebug, isn’t yet available on the latest version. So I have to stick to 3.6.15 for now. One rather annoying aspect of FF4 was the reworking of the Status Bar – it took me a while to figure out that the Add-on Bar works the same way.
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Never felt the need for or fretted over absence of status bar.
Hey, there is a Firebug 1.7 for Firefox 4. Click here and scroll to bottom of page. Wait, it looks like a beta.
Although we’ve played with a lot of WP plugins, for some inexplicable reason we’ve never dicked around with Firefox add-ons (except that we tried Firefox-syn once and didn’t think it a big deal since you can copy bookmarks on a flash drive).
But this time we plan to dig around the Firefox add-on bin.
BTW, when you search for WordPress in the Firefox add-ons, you get 54 results. There could be a gold nugget there for hardcore WP users like us.
Installed 🙂
Migrated to firefox a year back and there’s no turning back to IE. IE sucks.
Firefox 4 looks cool but where is that orange tab? I don’t see anything like that!
SearchIndia.com Responds:
The orange thing is on the top extreme left containing the drop-down inverted triangle for the various options. We should not have called it a “tab” because a tab has a different meaning in the browser context, referring to new web pages opened.
I couldn’t find it either, the images on the site shows the orange button… maybe its in the options
SearchIndia.com Responds:
We see it on Windows Vista desktop but not on the XP netbook.
Google Chrome(11.0.696 beta) I have is faster than the 3.6.7 version of firefox that I use. But I don’t use chrome much, only at times. I’ve stopped using IE long ago. IE is so backward compared to firefox and chrome. No matter what the version of IE, it is still behind Firefox and Chrome. Haven’t downloaded ff 4 yet. Gotta try it out.
SearchIndia.com Responds:
We’re great votaries of open source products – Linux, Firefox, Apache, WordPress….