Firefox 4 Pet Peeves


Firefox 4 is being released Tuesday and if you followed my blog for the past few months and ready my comments about the betas, I ripped it toshreds. That being said, they really cleaned it up by the time the Release Candidate hit and now I have to say I’m a fan. Sorry for being critical – it was for your own good. And for the most part, it’s decent. I will still use both browsers. But these things need some work:

  • Why on earth are App Tabs deleted if history is cleared? I want to keep Gmail in its own app tab. But I also like clearing my history on close. Thisapparentlydeletes the app tab.The point of an App Tab is to be a static part of the browser. Chrome remembers them. They should not be stored in the session. That’s nonsense.
  • The defaulttoolbar layoutis confusing as hell. Why is the refresh button to the right of the location bar and why is the home button and bookmarks button all the way on the right? Also, see that little dropdown arrow on the tab bar? No one knows what that does (it’s tab candy) (PS – ignore my FireBug button. That’s not there by default.
  • Still not as fast as Chrome – They did an amazing job with the newJavaScriptengine. It benchmarks only about 50-100ms slower than Chrome’s V8. Which is pretty good considering that 3.6 is slower than shit and is 400-500ms slower.
  • 97/100 on Acid 3. Where are the other 3 points?

Where is it better than Chrome?

  • Hardware acceleration – On Microsoft’s FishIE Tank, Chrome runs like shit. Firefox is decent. I still think IE9 is faster though which is straight up pathetic.
  • Printing – Google doesn’t seem to think it’s important to put printing options in the browser.

Overall, a very solid browser. I take back my previous rants about it.