Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Officially Released

[bug77]

Big boys? Chrome has taken a good chunk of the browser market since it arrived (mainly from IE), but Opera?

Tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gesture, standards compliance. Opera had all of that before any other browser (and probably other I don't know about). So from a technical point of view, Opera is up there at the top.

[Prescience500]

I remember reading somewhere that a lot of Chrome's speed wasn't greater performance so much as it was "responsiveness" and that it was only precieved as being faster even though it was more evenly matched. The exception was with javascript, which in Firefox 4 was supercharged with a shot of Jager, so to speak.

Why exactly does it seem like so many developers seem to prefer Webkit over Gecko nowadays, besides maybe javascript? Is there something inheritly wrong with Gecko or is it harder to program using it or is Gecko like X (with a lot of cruft and uncommonly used code) and Webkit like Wayland?

[Kano]

When you compare FF and Chrome, then Chrome is faster for users who heavyly search the web because there is only one input bar and not two for url and searches. I disliked that change from Mozilla (one bar) to Firefox (two bars) since the first release. Now even IE9 follows what Chome has shown to be more efficient. Well basically FF can use one single bar too, when you use

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

It is currently a bit outdated for the FF 4 final release so you can disable compat checks with

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/nightly-tester-tools/

or just modifiy the install.rdf (straight forward), the xpi is just a zip. Then you can use it just like Chrome but you have much more addons for it. Some are not yet updated like Quake Live, but i checked that this little hack works - you don't install the addon, but you extract it:

rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/npquakelive*;wget -qO/tmp/ql.zip http://cdn.quakelive.com/assets/2011031503/QuakeLivePlugin_433.xpi;test $(uname -m) = x86_64 && unzip -od ~/.mozilla /tmp/ql.zip *64.so || unzip -od ~/.mozilla /tmp/ql.zip *86.so;rm -f /tmp/ql.zip

I use a a precoded version, no idea if there is a better url. Just delete the plugin from the local plugin folder when a new addon is there.

Looking at the rendering speed i see no huge differences of all major browsers in current releases. Basically every new browser wins at least one java script benchmark. Compared to FF 3.5/3.6 the speed is much better - against those browsers Chrome was a night/day experience, now it is just personal preference. I really like RSS bookmarks, those only work with an addon for Chrome - that means you can not even import em from FF - this is a huge drawback.

[bug77]

Why exactly does it seem like so many developers seem to prefer Webkit over Gecko nowadays, besides maybe javascript? Is there something inheritly wrong with Gecko or is it harder to program using it or is Gecko like X (with a lot of cruft and uncommonly used code) and Webkit like Wayland?

It's the latter. Gecko is meant to do a lot more (like rendering XUL - check out Songbird) while Webkit is HTML-only. That makes Webkit slimmer and more compelling for embedding.

[curaga]

One input bar - mmhhmm - isn't that what leaks all your urls to google, even though they have nothing to do with searching anything? Yes, that one bar :P

[Apopas]

Does anyone know how many times it has been downloaded during the first 24 hours?

[89c51]

Does anyone know how many times it has been downloaded during the first 24 hours?

Firefox 4 for desktop launched yesterday and we?re excited to report that within 24 hours of being announced it had been downloaded 7.1 million times

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/03/23/firefox-four-day-one/

[Apopas]

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/03...-four-day-one/

Thank you bro!
Unfortunately it didn't pass the previous record of 8,2 millions of Firefox3, though these numbers don't count the downloads through desktop repositories.

[XorEaxEax]

Tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gesture, standards compliance. Opera had all of that before any other browser (and probably other I don't know about). So from a technical point of view, Opera is up there at the top.

So when you say Opera is a 'big dog', that is entirely based upon them having certain features first?

And if that is the case, then I'd say Firefox definately belongs there (since you listed Chrome as a 'big dog') just by them implementing extensions/add-ons which is something both Chrome and (finally) Opera has later incorporated due to user pressure. In fact I'd say the flexibility given by add-ons is paramount to Firefox's success.

At the end of the day, prominent features will be picked up across all browsers and then it's about offering them up in the best package. In this area Firefox and Chrome are obviously doing well given their huge uptake these past years. I'd like to see Opera doing better because I think the more competition we have the better, but it just isn't gaining marketshare. Maybe it's the closed source thing which makes it hard to get a strong community going, I don't know.

[XorEaxEax]

Thank you bro!
Unfortunately it didn't pass the previous record of 8,2 millions of Firefox3, though these numbers don't count the downloads through desktop repositories.

True, but the desktop repository downloads didn't count for Firefox3 either so I don't see that entering the equation. Still I think it's very impressive numbers, particularly given that there was a much bigger hype around the release of Firefox3, with Mozilla actively wanting to enter to Guiness World or Records for most downloads in a day (which I belive they did).