Upgrading to Firefox4

I downloaded Firefox 4 yesterday (and apparently I’m not alone, Mozilla have already racked up over 7 million downloads at the time of writing) and have been genuinely impressed by a) the speed of opening from a cold start and b) improved page load time.

Of course I’ve not done any benchmarks so I’m not entirely sure how much of this is psychological (ooh shiny new product must be faster, that sort of thing) and how much is actual, but there we go.

My biggest gripes so far:

  • Support for browser.tab.tabMaxWidth and browser.tab.tabMinWidth has been deprecated. It took rather a lot of Googling to discover that a) it now needs to be done in userChrome.css and most importantly you need to set browser.tabs.animate to false otherwise you end up with ghost tabs. See: Firefox 4 Beta: Tab width CSS for more information
  • You can’t trial personas by hovering over the images on the Persona page now. You have to install, and then remove if you don’t like it. It’s not a major pain in the butt, just a bit of added inconvenience.

Err, and that’s about it. Not bad so far.

7 comments so far

  1. Carly said:
    On 23 Mar at 4:26 pm

    Oh I quite liked being able to trial personas, then saying that, I’ve had the SAME skin on my FireFox for over 3 years on every computer I’ve owned….. Pimpzilla in case you’re wondering… Gold bling buttons & leopard print …

  2. Jem said:
    On 23 Mar at 4:30 pm

    Saddo :p

  3. Ben said:
    On 23 Mar at 4:38 pm

    Hovering over the thumbnails still trail the persona for me… weird that this does not happen for you.

  4. Amelie said:
    On 23 Mar at 4:43 pm

    That’s interesting, because I can still preview personas on the Mac version of Firefox (don’t use them on Windows, have a theme instead). Wonder if they forgot something somewhere…

  5. Jem said:
    On 23 Mar at 9:24 pm

    That’s odd. Just upgraded at home and the personas thing works (and it kept my old one, unlike at work)

  6. Vera said:
    On 24 Mar at 4:57 am

    As a self respecting FF, fan I hurried over to download version 4, at work. I think it lasted a grand total of 30 minutes on my computer before I switched back to version 3.6.16

    Reason: JS and PHP redirects were not picked up by the address bar. Since my app has a lot of JS powered (as well as PHP-powered redirects), the URL would not update properly. The address bad kept showing the URL for the login page, although I was clearly NOT on the login page anymore. I did some minimal searching for this… but didn’t find anything. I don’t suppose you know something about this? :(

  7. Vera said:
    On 24 Mar at 5:10 am

    Correction: problem only occurred locally, where I was using a virtual host. But it still gave me the creeps :