Firefox 4 'feature complete' beta debuts after Jager shot Mozilla has released a seventh Firefox 4 beta, flipping the switch on the new JaegerMonkey Javascript engine extension, folding in additional hardware acceleration, and allowing developers to build plug-in-free 3D graphics via WebGL. "This means pages load faster, interactions with websites are snappier and the Web is just a …
It feels quick which is nice.
Status bar is gone, so where has my IE tab indicator been moved to?
Stop/reload button has become a stop/reload/go button and been moved to the end of the address bar.
Other than that it's looking good so far. I may even be persuaded to upgrade my work client which I have so far resisted.
You can move the reload/stop buttons back by changing the buttons on the toolbar and dragging them to the left hand side of the address bar.
There's an add-ons bar instead if you look in View > Toolbars, your IE tab indicator is probably there, but I'm not sure why they thought it was a good idea to knock the status bar on the head.
It's snappier (TM), that's for sure.
> back to 3.6.12 where all things work and the tabs are in the right place BELOW the address bar...
From the video I found here http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/ all you need to do is right-click on the toolbar and uncheck "tabs on top". "Tabs on Top" start about 1:14
Firefox 4 is a very usable browser but some of the UI "enhancements" are half baked, ill thought out or otherwise retrograde steps. Tab groups for example might work if they were better integrated, but sitting out as they are in effectively another screen more or less kills the point of the feature even existing. The tab group button should be a springloaded loaded popup or a side bar or something so it's easier to see what's going on. App tabs are similarly ill thought out - if I click Home on an app tab I probably want to go to the initial url that the tab was loaded with.
Beta 7 also appears to be lacking a status bar. It used to be there but now it isn't and I can't see any way to reenable it either from the View menu or from about:config. With no status, the address bar doubles up as a status bar. All well and good except the address bar doesn't have space to show the same amount of text as a status bar did. So hovering over a long link doesn't yield useful information, just some truncated text. Also some extensions like to reside in the status bar. Now where are they supposed to reside? The toolbars at the top are pretty cramped.It doesn't seem like much to let users to decide for themselves if they want a status bar or not.
You can still get your extensions (NoScript, IETab etc) if you turn on the Add On Bar. This is now a full XML toolbar rather than a status bar, which means you can drag other options down there (it's where my bookmark toolbar now sits).
Yes, it might get annoying that you can't always view the full URL of a link you're hovering over, but perhaps there are addons for this for people who miss this feature. I'm happy with it showing the URL in the main navigation toolbar, that way you can compare where you are with where you're going without having to glance up and down the page.
The add on bar is just the the status bar without the functionality it used to have. Removing the functionality altogether is a retrograde step
I'm sure an add on could reinstate the the functionality but it's so trivial that it should be there by default, even if a user has to drag and drop a status item from the toolbar customization dialog.
Other browsers manage to show a full link. For example Google Chrome will show a fade-in / fade-out the full url link when you hover over one.
ITS a BETA! hopefully it will be faster after it is optimized and finished up for the final release...
So Decide.... do you want to get all your websites...
working **properly** - wait for the final FF4.
- or not formatted properly, JS not ok, but faster???? go away and use opera then.....
Its your choice, no one is forcing you.....
you could even wait a looooong time for the 'opera with extensions' that is only just alpha....
If you want the status bar back, it's now an extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/
You'll need to eanble the Add-ons bar and then use Customise... to drag stuff like Progress Meter, Download Status and Status Items. What I like about the extension is that it has loads of prefs that give you a lot of control, *plus* remove the hover URL from the location bar *and* get rid of the horrendous bright green thin progress meter at the bottom of the location bar. In other words, much like Firefox 3's status bar was, but even more customisable.
Are none of such a thing. In fact I feel very pissed when people call reinventing the wheel "innovation".
Their "innovation" is nothing more than a bunch of contrived changes to the GUI for the sake of change, no one asked for any gui change because the GUI was OK.
What people has been complaining for ages and with no end in sight is memory consumption, slow start-ups and general performance degradation.
And what does Mozilla do about those dreadful issues almost every single user has? NOTHING!, let me repeat, N-O-T-H-I-N-G.
Instead they choose to change the GUI almost entirely, waste time providing us with an over-engineering tab grouping feature that doesn't work well, and remove useful features like the status bar. (And those are not the biggest felonies, but not the only ones, gratuitous ad-don breaking I'm talking to you!!!)
The funny thing about the grouping thing is that no one "gets it" or find it useful, and what does Mozilla do? they put a bloody video on the next beta so people will at last understand what the thing is for, assuming not that maybe the feature is not well designed/devised, but that their user base are all morons who can not make sense of their greatest invention.
Sooner or later a proper Adblock is going to be released for another browser, and that day FF will lose a big chunk of users straight away. In my case the only reason I'm using Firefox is "adblock" and occasionally "firebug".
read my last post... quit ranting, and realize your limited options.... chrome, FF, opera, or...???
If you bothered to check, adblock IS available for all these....
(Unless your are not talking about the 'capability', but 'ease of use' ?? A bit like you learned to drive on auto gears, and dont want to learn to use a 'stick-shift'... )
and you might find Opera is more capable than the FF one!! (FF needs a DNS tweak for the really bad pop-ups, that never get past O...)
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