Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
After using it for some 36 hours (no not straight through) I'm really liking Firefox 4. Very fast! I have no issues with plug-ins. My Xmarks and EXIF viewer work fine. Have not had any crashes etc. It is different and takes some getting used to but ...
One thing that annoys me is the "reload/refresh" button is on the wrong side of the address/location bar.  |
Right click on the Nav bar. Choose Customize. The Stop and Reload buttons will appear between the Nave box and the Search box. Drag and drop the buttons where you like them, just like you could in previous releases.
Yes, it's quick. Major goals for 4.0 were performance improvements and reducing the amount of chrome used by the browser.
Performance improvements included using native hardware acceleration where possible, switching from synchronous to asynchronous programming, so the whole browser doesn't hang waiting for something to complete, and moving to Jaegermonkey, a new and faster JavaScript engine. Since a good deal of FF itself is actually implemented in JavaScript, this has overall benefits.
Hardware acceleration does involve the occasional funny. On Windows, FF 4 uses DirectX, and is uncovering problems in DX implementation. I was bemused to watch FF attempting to enumerate
every font on my system, and I have about 1,200 installed. Why was it doing so? A DirectX call triggered it, and an MS library was the culprit. To avoid clobbering startup performance, FF's workaround was to delay the operation till later in the FF load process, but a real fix will require MS to fix their code. (IE9 is also bitten by this, so MS might have an incentive to actually
make the fix...)
Chrome reduction includes things like the placement of the Stop/Reload button, Tabs on Top, and rearchitecting toolbars.
FF4 looks like this, here: (Menu Bar, Bookmarks Bar, and Addons Bar are all hidden until moused over.)
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Dennis