Review: Firefox 4

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 and in my bid to sample all the new browsers, I’ve dutifully downloaded it. What’s new about this version is not just that version 5 is due for a release within three months, but also that Mozilla is moving to the Chrome system of eschewing version numbers from herein. Like security software, browsers are turning into self-updating software.

I’ve not been huge fan of Firefox in the past. I like the interface well enough – very well in fact – and I’m fond of many extensions, but I’ve been deeply unhappy with Firefox’s appetite for RAM.

It was with some trepidation, then, that I noted how much cosmetic change had occurred in FF4. The tabs are on top, the stop and refresh buttons have (finally) been combined, and the menu bar has been converted to a single button – the big orange Firefox rectangle. As with Internet Explorer 9, it may take a little while to get used to the redecorating, but fortunately, you can also rejig things at least partly back to the old system.

Finding and installing extentions is now managed through an app store-like interface. Given the importance of extensions in Firefox, this is a great move, and makes it easier to work with many extensions.

I can’t help but think everybody in the browser biz has been learning from the Microsoft Ribbon interface and Chrome, given the tendency to single button menu access and focus on tabs as the smallest unit of browsing, but of more concern was whether FF4’s surface alterations meant no big shifts under the hood.

Fortunately, there’s also a lot of new engine code. Improved HTML5 support and faster Javascript are just two of the changes, and FF4 brings WebGL, capable of 3D graphics, as well as hardware acceleration.

This results in considerably more speed than in Firefox 3.5 or 3.6, which could often feel sluggish. Firefox 4 feels positively nimble by comparison.

As the kind of person who uses tabs as a kind of research library, and rarely closes my browser, FF4’s new tab panorama is nifty, allowing me to shift tabs between groups, create and delete groups and more (though I couldn’t find a way to move tab groups between windows, or into a new window, to my disappointment). In my testing, performance slowed to a crawl during my days-long browsing sessions with 40+ tabs, requiring restarts. I'm definitely an unusual user, however. For most people, this kind of issue has been averted with better memory management and resulting better performance.

On the privacy front, Mozilla has implemented a “do not track” feature, which sounds great until you realise that it requires websites to voluntarily sign on to it. Mozilla says it will be making a big push for exactly that, but we’ll have to see how it pans out.

Firefox 4 still leads the way when it comes to features and development – its ambitious offerings set the standard for everyone else, but Chrome and Opera edge it out on speed. Internet Explorer 9 is sadly still taking up the rear. The only downside to all the new browsers is that everything is feeling a little same-same. I hope minimalist is your style.