firefox 4 released

[hclarkjr]

MLAA is enabled for me, still no problem

 

[Qbah]

MLAA was causing problems only in the first AMD driver that supported it - 10.10a-e. it was distorting any Aero-enabled window. Since 10.11 it doesn't influence Aero at all.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Workaround for the font problem is here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/
Set antialias to Cleartype, and rendering mode to GDI natural.

 

[wayliff]

Ok I think I found the reason, although with the previous firefox version it seems to behave better...both the machines i've tried have the boinc client installed and are constantly crunching. Once I suspended processing, firefox was quite snappier.

Might have to do something with process priority or something in that department.

Well after further testing - setting the boinc client to idle did improve performance however I do notice stuttering here and there...which I did not notice with FF3.

I may be going back to FF3 for the time being.

 

[ViRGE]

Workaround for the font problem is here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/
Set antialias to Cleartype, and rendering mode to GDI natural.

That changes things some, but it doesn't replicate the font situation without HW acceleration. The kerning in particular is quite bad; it makes text difficult to quickly read.

 

[Iron Woode]

I am seeing strange ram issues.

it starts using 900 meg with 15 tabs open and after 10 mins it drops down to 500.

something's not right.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

That changes things some, but it doesn't replicate the font situation without HW acceleration. The kerning in particular is quite bad; it makes text difficult to quickly read.

Yeah, it's definitely not a total fix, but it's an improvement for those that don't want to give up acceleration.

 

[Demo24]

I fixed my site rendering problem through a combination of cache clearing and cookie deletion.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Is there a way to get the status bar on the bottom back?

Don't like how I have to right click on the Back Button to see previously visited sights. Used to be able to do with the left click.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Try this addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

Is there a way to get the status bar on the bottom back?

Don't like how I have to right click on the Back Button to see previously visited sights. Used to be able to do with the left click.

 

[lowrider69]

It's amazing it took them this long to get version 4 out of the door and parts if it still seem half baked. I can live without the status bar, although I don't get why they removed it, but some people really want it and have to resort to using extensions. Maybe in the next update they can add an option to enable it. They also have to fix the font rendering, it sucks, again people have to resort to using an extension to fix that...or disable acceleration. I'll keep it installed and use it but I think they should have left certain things alone and worked out the kinks with other things before releasing it.

 

[Minjin]

I don't know why people are having so much difficulty with the status bar. Right click up top near your navigation buttons and reenable it. Enabling/disabling bars and customizing them is Firefox 101. I had mine back within a minute of installing FF4. No extensions needed.

 

[Kr@n]

That changes things some, but it doesn't replicate the font situation without HW acceleration. The kerning in particular is quite bad; it makes text difficult to quickly read.

Kerning should theoretically be better due to sub-pixel positionning in DirectWrite (i.e. the text rendering backend used with D2D with HW on). With GDI, letters were "snapped" to pixel boundaries.

I think we just have to get used to it. I also hope DW rendering will be improved by MS as more applications use hardware acceleration.

Also, make sure you have the different Microsoft KB fixes (which are coincidently installed with IE9) for DirectWrite (one is for blurriness, the other for startup slowness, etc.)

And update your video drivers ^^ (to fix some MLAA blurriness for example).

 

[lowrider69]

I don't know why people are having so much difficulty with the status bar. Right click up top near your navigation buttons and reenable it. Enabling/disabling bars and customizing them is Firefox 101. I had mine back within a minute of installing FF4. No extensions needed.

The add-on bar doesn't serve the same purpose as the status bar. The old status bar served a dual purpose of displaying your add-ons if they were set to show up there and displayed download status, link urls, etc.... If you enable the add-on bar in FF4 and hover over a link it shows the link URL above the add-on bar. It also doesn't display download status.

Personally not a big deal to me but it bothers other people.

 

[Minjin]

The add-on bar doesn't serve the same purpose as the status bar. The old status bar served a dual purpose of displaying your add-ons if they were set to show up there and displayed download status, link urls, etc.... If you enable the add-on bar in FF4 and hover over a link it shows the link URL above the add-on bar. It also doesn't display download status.

Personally not a big deal to me but it bothers other people.

We're talking about the bar on the bottom, right? I can't verify if those individual features worked but everything seemed fine to me (before I uninstalled FF4). I noticed the lack of the bar immediately because that's where I have my weather forecast, Camelizer, Greasemonkey, Download Statusbar, etc.. When I enabled it, everything was back.

Are you saying that they kept the use of the bar for add-ons but took away the inherent uses of it?

 

[Muse]

Still using 3.6.13. Does version 4 have any improvement for slow action (keyboard lag, etc.) with a lot of windows and tabs open? This is my main complaint/problem browsing.

If I go to version 4, should I use one of the latest candidates, e.g. R2 build 3?

 

[hclarkjr]

Still using 3.6.13. Does version 4 have any improvement for slow action (keyboard lag, etc.) with a lot of windows and tabs open? This is my main complaint/problem browsing.

If I go to version 4, should I use one of the latest candidates, e.g. R2 build 3?

RC2 Build 3 is the final version released to the public

 

[Demo24]

Still using 3.6.13. Does version 4 have any improvement for slow action (keyboard lag, etc.) with a lot of windows and tabs open? This is my main complaint/problem browsing.

If I go to version 4, should I use one of the latest candidates, e.g. R2 build 3?

I don't notice any lag, then again I don't tend to have 20 tabs open at once. Usually between 6-10 though.

And FF 4.0 is the official release, I don't know why you'd go with the older RC builds?

 

[Minjin]

http://lifehacker.com/#!5784864/how-to-fix-annoyances-with-firefox-4s-new-look

If you're getting lag with FF3, it has probably gotten stale. You have to cook a new one every time it gets up to about 850mb in memory. Close the program and restart it when it does so. I typically wait till it gets to about a gig but I start noticing slowdowns before then.

 

[hclarkjr]

firefox already past the number of downloads for IE9 for the first 24 hours
http://www.techpowerup.com/142727/Firefox-4-Clocks-Over-Six-Million-Downloads-in-First-24-Hours.html

 

[Synomenon]

The new "status bar" is annoying. Whenever I hover over a link, the URL preview blocks a bookmark or two when my bookmarks pane is open.

 

[bruceb]

Muse,

Like you I was also hesitant about switching to FF4 .. had only minor issues.
Mainly "Remove It Permanently" no longer works in FF4 (yet) .. had to update
a few other add-ons.

Can't stand the "new look" (ugh) navigation buttons (somewhat fixable with another
theme) and the bland background colorless status messages are horrible. But the
browser does seem faster.

 

[ViRGE]

firefox already past the number of downloads for IE9 for the first 24 hours
http://www.techpowerup.com/142727/Firefox-4-Clocks-Over-Six-Million-Downloads-in-First-24-Hours.html

That's not surprising. MS didn't push IE9 out as an update yet, Mozilla did so with Firefox however.

 

[bruceb]

Firefox needs to fix those bland status messages. I would like to have some sort of user customizable backgrounds colors and default font colors for these user information messages. What genius decided to put Dark Grey on a Light Grey background ? ? Or worse, simple text on a totally White Background ? ? In a word: UGLY

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Here's a good review that covers all of the new features and even had a few things in there that i didn't know about:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/03/ars-reviews-firefox-4.ars/