Firefox 4 officially launched, 12,000,000 downloads and climbing fast

Chrome is still faster, thread closed

chrome sucks who care if it's open with 0.0001 ms faster?

Who cares - as long as can connect to the net who gives a shite!!??

I use all three browsers for my web compatibility checks (and safari too) and dont notice any major differences in the majority of pages so to close teh thread - its "horses for courses"

'Panorama' is an awesome new feature!

4.0 is considerably faster and more stable, too by the look of things, especially if you have a lot of tabs opened. Liking it a lot so far, FF will remain my main browser (FF extensions > *).

i luv panorama!

FF 4 kick ass!

Chrome is just more than fast...it has all the same gadgets FF does (extensions and plugins)....even you've not even tried Chrome for more than 10 seconds than honestly you don't have a very well opinion, and FF is still as always a mem hog, and of course Opera is still good to, and hell IE9 is coming along nice to.

And yes i have them all installed and even Safari.

Chrome extensions simply are not as good / powerful as Firefox ones, they can't be. Best example for this is AdBlock. The reason for this is the design of the browser: FF extension APIs allow them a lot more control, FF extensions have access to all core functions of the browser, while Chrome extensions do not. That's the reason why you have to restart FF every time you uninstall an extension (at least for now, Mozilla are going to change that in future), while you don't with Chrome. That's also the reason why there's still no NoScript for Chrome, another hugely popular FF extension.

FF 4.0 javascript performance has improved so much that the speed argument really isn't valid anymore. FF 4.0 is a very fast browser, just like Chrome, it supports D3D / OpenGL hardware acceleration, it has everything a modern browser needs. If you prefer a different browser it's fine, but speed can't be a reason anymore.

Originally Posted by shipwreck

Chrome extensions simply are not as good / powerful as Firefox ones, they can't be. Best example for this is AdBlock. The reason for this is the design of the browser: FF extension APIs allow them a lot more control, FF extensions have access to all core functions of the browser, while Chrome extensions do not. That's the reason why you have to restart FF every time you uninstall an extension (at least for now, Mozilla are going to change that in future), while you don't with Chrome. That's also the reason why there's still no NoScript for Chrome, another hugely popular FF extension.

FF 4.0 javascript performance has improved so much that the speed argument really isn't valid anymore. FF 4.0 is a very fast browser, just like Chrome, it supports D3D / OpenGL hardware acceleration, it has everything a modern browser needs. If you prefer a different browser it's fine, but speed can't be a reason anymore.

Oddly, last time I checked there were plenty of restartless applications for FF, and NoScripts was ported to Chrome as NotScripts.
As for security, the obvious choice is chrome, as the recent pwn2own demonstration showed.

What Firefox extension can be uninstalled without a restart? Some FF extensions need to be removed in safe mode even. Mozilla have been working on this, but AFAIK it's not finished yet.

NotScripts is not NoScript, although it does add a lot of its functionality. Still prefer the original.

P.S.: As far as security goes, it's very simple really: The more popular a browser is, the more interesting it is for all kinds of malware coders. Once Chrome gains the popularity of Firefox or IE, you'll see a lot more exploits for it popping up all over the place. Complex software is always vulnerable.

The key is to close those security holes ASAP and provide patches regularly. Mozilla is on track with that.

Just ran Peacekeeper benchmark and chrome smashed firefox but I'd still never stop using firefox as my main browser.
Weird thing was, when I clicked on Detail chrome gave higher figures on all tests except on, Complex graphics, firefox gave a much higher figure in that 1 test.
Link should work for a while if anyone wants a nosey lol
http://clients.futuremark.com/peacek...ction?key=5aKl

Usually no fan of 'artificial' benchmarks, but this is a pretty interesting article on this issue (benchmarking all of the newer browsers):

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/i...e_skin;content

I was particularly surprised about the rather crappy performance of the IE 9.0 64Bit version.

Real life performance is all that matters though. A few ms here and there make no difference.

Originally Posted by shipwreck

What Firefox extension can be uninstalled without a restart? Some FF extensions need to be removed in safe mode even. Mozilla have been working on this, but AFAIK it's not finished yet.

Here: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/20...tless-add-ons/

See, I like firefox and I've been one of the early adopters, meaning I used it since even before 1.0 (can't recall right now which was it). Chrome came in, and it blew it away in terms of performance.
And now IE9 blew both away, for what I've been seeing (and God, I hate IE).

Oh. Did I forget to say the long list of incompatible addons whenever FF is upgraded? In my particular case, they were no more no less than nine when upgrading to FF4.

Since I don't use any of those addons, I wasn't aware of them. But thanks for the link, quite interesting. It's obvious that those kind of addons that can be removed / installed without restart are rather basic and don't use core functions of the browser engine, at least for now, since Mozilla do want to change the extension SDK to make this easier, as mentioned earlier.

The incompatibility of the extensions can't really be blamed on Mozilla though. Firefox 4.0 is long overdue, extension developers had more than enough time to make their code compatible, but some of them just did not. Three of my extensions weren't compatible, of which two are now obsolete due the new Panorama feature of FF 4.0.

I've used Firefox (or rather Firebird back then) since the early betas (0.6x if memory serves me right), I also use Chrome and have an Android phone, I even use IE occasionally, too. I'm far from being dogmatic on the browser issue. But for me, Firefox clearly is the best 'package' on the PC (mobile is a different issue). Other browsers do have their advantages, be it speed or certain functionality (Chrome's major advantage isn't primarily speed for me, but the increased stability due to giving each tab its own process - Mozilla still have to implement this in the upcoming FF versions, as announced), but at the end of the day, none of them are so flexible and customisable like FF, mainly due to the powerful extensions.

The closest rival for me is Chrome (and not IE, despite IE 9.0).

Thanks for the nice sharing. To-day, I have downloaded and install it.

I've just updated the thread's title.

I like the App Tab functionality
Accidentally closed a window in the Panorama mode
It feels like it's approaching a Chrome layout.

The one thing I hate about Chrome is that I can't use hover to drag text to another tab like I can in Firefox. This is something I tend to do a lot.