FF4 and IE9

Mercutio

Mercutio

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New browsers. IE9, which is supposed to suck less than other IEs, and Firefox 4, which isn't quite out yet but is coming Real Soon Now.

I've been using FF4 for about a month on at least a few machines. The UI has been changed to more closely resemble Chrome's. To my annoyance, that means ditching the web page title and (by default, anyway) the bookmarks toolbar. Other than the fact that some of my addons are broken and the minor UI changes, I don't see a lot of difference between Firefox 3 and 4 at this point.

Supposedly, Javascript performance is eleventy times better on both IE9 and FF4, and they're both also supposed to offer better compatibility with HTML5 content.

Anyway, this is a thread for bitching about new browsers, because we have. Also, we can take this opportunity to point and laugh at people who use Safari for Windows and/or Opera.
 
CougTek

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I sometimes use Opera, although I'm so familiar to Firefox 3 that it's the one I almost always use. I hate the pastel colors of Chrome and I'm not so fond of it's layout. I forced myself to use it some time ago and I still do on rare occasion. Chrome introduced some good things though, like confining tabs into their own boxes (safer).

I refuse to use IE unless I'm with customers who prefer not to use anything else. And Safari on Windows...no thanks. It's supposed to be not so bad, but I have an aversion for anything coming from the marketing company that Apple is.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

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My biggest problem with FF4 is that they repositioned the Home and Stop/Reload buttons to the useless right side of the screen.

I've been trying to get IE9 since yesterday but apparently Microsoft's servers are too damned busy.
 
Handruin

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When I last tried the beta of FF4, I used it for a week and went back to FF3. I really miss the status bar at the very bottom. I normally mouse over URL links and quickly read where the URL is going to send me before I actually click. I do this as my own self-defense for many reasons. I could not find a way to bring this back in FF4 and I greatly miss it.

Yes, I realize FF4 will now do the same but it will be up in the top URL bar, but it truncates the link so that I can't read it very well and I'm so conditioned to looking at the bottom that I forget to now look up to read it.

I also disliked the changing of the home, stop, and reload buttons like Mercutio suggested. Those things combined caused me to uninstall FF4.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

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Mouseover URLs do now appear in the bottom left corner, just not in a status bar. It's an odd effect. Losing the status bar also causes issues for some of my favorite addons, such as Foxytunes.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

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An insurance agency I support has software from one or other of the big insurers that absolutely won't run on anything else. Not IE7, not IE8 in compatibility mode, nor any other browser.

That's pretty damned special right there.
 
timwhit

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I've found FF4 to perform so much better than 3.6.x, the difference is enough that I won't worry about any of the UI change.
 
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timwhit

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Bozo said:
I had tried that before and for some reason it wouldn't load. This time it did.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

No problem. Keep in mind that the x86_64 version is not as new or updated as the regular x86 version, so it probably has unpatched security holes.
 
Handruin

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Mercutio said:
Mouseover URLs do now appear in the bottom left corner, just not in a status bar. It's an odd effect. Losing the status bar also causes issues for some of my favorite addons, such as Foxytunes.
Click to expand...

I just installed FF4 to give it another chance and I like it better than the earlier beta. I see what you mean about the hovering URL display at the bottom. I'm very happy they fixed this. I also wanted to point out that there is an add-on bar that can be added to the bottom which might fix the issues you spoke of. Was this option available when you last tried FF4?
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

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I'd argue that anything quad core is pretty powerful, but with all the stuff we can do now with HTML and Javascript, I guess that might not be true any more.
 
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time

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FF4 does have performance problems, despite superlative javascript benchmarks. It's very obvious on this old 1.8GHz Athlon. :(

Viewing that live status page in FF4, it manages barely 2 updates per second while using 98% of the CPU. The latest beta of Opera 11.10 delivers about 4 updates per second, but still averages maybe 94% CPU.

Chrome just blows them away with probably 6 updates per second (faster than I can count) with CPU usage mostly below 60%. On this PC, the animation only looks fluid with Chrome (don't get the wrong idea here, I only use it as a backup browser).

Another place you can see FF4 struggle is Logitech's website. When you browse their mouse (or keyboard) products, they are arranged in a row that can be scrolled with a slider or arrow buttons. Try dragging the slider as fast as you can (or push one of the buttons) to see the problem (undoubtedly worse on this old PC, I haven't had a chance to install FF4 on anything else yet).

FF4 still has great compatibility: after clicking on one of the products and returning, it's the only browser (apart from IE) to keep state so the slider and images are still in the same place.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

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As usual, I can't upgrade most of my machines to the new version yet because my addons aren't widely supported yet. I think they might have over emphasized javascript and HTML5 at the expense of other stuff. And it's a damned shame that new Firefox isn't really an acceptable legacy browser.
 
Mercutio

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If you go in to the options menu, there's menu option called "Toolbar Layout" that lets you drag crap around. So it's possible to put Reload and Home back where they belong.
 
timwhit

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Mercutio said:
If you go in to the options menu, there's menu option called "Toolbar Layout" that lets you drag crap around. So it's possible to put Reload and Home back where they belong.
Click to expand...

That was in 3.6 and earlier versions as well. I don't remember if it was called the same thing or not.
 
timwhit

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Firefox 3.6 never really performed well on any Linux distro in my experience; much worse performance compared with Windows on comparable hardware. However, FF4's Linux performance actually seems to be on par with the Windows version from what I can tell. Just thought I'd mention it, as it makes me happy.

Chrome's performance on Linux has always seemed to be comparable with Windows FWIW. Chrome just doesn't have the extensions I can't live without.
 
Handruin

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Mercutio said:
I'd argue that anything quad core is pretty powerful, but with all the stuff we can do now with HTML and Javascript, I guess that might not be true any more.
Click to expand...

My work machine is an Intel Xeon E5405 @ 2.0 GHz. I have 4 real cores, but they're all slow.
 
Bozo

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The one thing that I miss is the ability to go directly to my home page (Google) when opening a new tab. You can do it on IE but not on Chrome or Firefox. At least I haven't found a way yet.
 
Bozo

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I've been using Chrome beta for a couple of days. I like it.
I wish it had one feature of IE9 though.
As soon as you finish downloading a file, IE9 scans it with MS Security Essentials. So far it has found two 'medium alert' items.
Nice
 
ddrueding

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Bozo said:
I've been using Chrome beta for a couple of days. I like it.
I wish it had one feature of IE9 though.
As soon as you finish downloading a file, IE9 scans it with MS Security Essentials. So far it has found two 'medium alert' items.
Nice
Click to expand...

Any decent AV package will do that for you. NOD32 works with Chrome, FF, Safari, and IE. It only makes sense that MS would lock-in that feature to only their browser.
 
Bozo

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ddrueding said:
Any decent AV package will do that for you. NOD32 works with Chrome, FF, Safari, and IE. It only makes sense that MS would lock-in that feature to only their browser.
Click to expand...

I don't know it it is only locked into Security Essentials. That's all I have installed.
 
mubs

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Handruin said:
Actually it was in FF4. My work PC isn't very powerful, so it could be related to that. FF4 uses 35% of my quad core when viewing that page.
Click to expand...

The FF4 stats page uses 50-51% of my Athlon 64 X2 Dual core 4400, 2.2 GHz CPU using FF 3.6.

I guess I will wait till they come out with FF 4.1!
 
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