Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Firefox 4 Impressions

Last week I installed IE9, so this week it was the turn of Firefox 4. I must say I was deeply underwhelmed by FF3 but was still cuirious enough to bite at 4.

OK, so it's not an "oh wowsie, this is the best browsah evah" moment, but it's definitely a vast improvement in many areas on 3.x, which was starting to look, feel and behave a little clunky for me (especially in comparison to the ultra-slick IE9). It's quite interesting to compare both browsers side-by-side, and note that in terms of the user experience at least they're now far more similar than they are different. Each has small and subtle points that make it better than the other, but on balance you'ld really have to look twice to notice.

Specifically talking about FF4, one genuinely crushing disappointment is the treatment of the bookmarks toolbar. I've always loathed this monstrosity, and unfortunately in FF4 it seems to have orchestrated an even more obnoxious hostile takeover than before. A quick search on Google reveals that I'm far from the only one who hates it, but somebody on the FF team obviously is unwilling to take this kind of feedback onboard. A "do not use the bookmarks toolbar" option would be nice to have, as would "do not show the bookmarks toolbar on the bookmarks menu".

Speaking of which, it's still not possible to just right-click/sort by name in the bookmarks menu. Sigh.

Overall though, and despite these gripes, it is definitely a significant and valuable jump ahead of 3.x, and I'm looking forward to making more use of it as time goes by.

3 comments:

gnounc said...

I always disable the bookmarks toolbar.
And every other toolbar to boot.

Its a single right click, followed by a single left click, not that bad.

Nyarlathotep said...

How do you feel about Chrome? I've used it before, and it's sleek and quick, but seems to have odd, nonsensical issues with some kinds of font rendering. On the whole, it leaves me feeling a little underwhelmed, and not just because the Adblock Plus addon for it seems a little bit fussier than Firefox's.

mhquake said...

I've used Chrome and found it nice enough but a bit too basic. Don't get me wrong, I like minimalism, but I like my minimalism to have a lot of powerful stuff behind the scenes for those who want it, and I just wasn't seeing that in Chrome.

I'm also not one of those guys who goes customizing my desktop and using loads of add-on stuff. Having to manage thousands of PCs and hundreds of servers in my day job taught me that it's more trouble than it's worth, and that if the base package falls just shy of being good enough or having what you want/need in it, then it's probably not worth using.