Firefox 4 beta review

The disappearance of the menu bar is presented as a benefit.

But how is replacing it by a "Windows Start Menu"-like SingleMenuTM an improvement? It means searching longer. I saw it in Opera, and it just looks sluggish to me, having to hunt for 15 minutes before I find what I'm looking for. First, I didn't even know where the menu bar went, and the silly Opera-icon is the "start menu".

The article fails to note the advances in Firefoxes JavaScript engine / JM+TM by the way:

http://arewefastyet.com/

showing the Firefox JS-engine is just as quick as Nitro (and almost as fast as Chrome) nowadays. It isn't included in all Firefox-4-beta's yet, only if you download a special JaegerMonkey-edition.

But after the team worked out the heuristics - something with guessing which optimization (tracing with TraceMonkey or JIT with JaegerMonkey) to use per task, then it will end up in FF4, and speed shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Last I heard Mozilla was not going to release a 64-bit Linux version. Since FF is open source I imagine some distros will compile their own without upstream support.

I have to admit I am liking Midori more and more and Firefox less and less.

Quoting:The disappearance of the menu bar is presented as a benefit.

But how is replacing it by a "Windows Start Menu"-like SingleMenuTM an improvement? It means searching longer. I saw it in Opera, and it just looks sluggish to me, having to hunt for 15 minutes before I find what I'm looking for. First, I didn't even know where the menu bar went, and the silly Opera-icon is the "start menu".

On the other hand the observation is that you don't need it all that often. When you don't need it, i.e. most of the time, it saves screen space; when you need it, it's still there. It's like Huffman coding for UI elements ;)

> Last I heard Mozilla was not going to release a 64-bit Linux version. Since FF is open source I imagine some distros will compile their own without upstream support.

I haven't ever seen 64-bit linux version of firefox on the mozilla's website. It is always found hidden in the contrib area of the mozilla ftp, so can't see what is really the difference. Most distros have always compiled own versions regardless (both for 32-bit and for 64-bit) -- just check "about:buildconfig" for any distro version compared to upstream version and see how the compile/configure flags vary greatly and so is "unsupported" by upstream in any case.

you can friggin' reenable the menubar!!!!!!%!$!#!$%1111112/3rd^8th

@tmx:

Did your modem hang up on you?

No, I'm angry today. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Of course, just like Windows 'failed' menu bar, you can enable classic view, and if not, there would be an add-on to do so.

That's not what's irritating me, it's the fact that they present it as a benefit and are just copying from other browsers instead of innovating.