Very disappointing but better a little late than very buggy. If any Moz Foundation folks linger around HN, my disappointment comes from how excited I am for FF 4 to arrive!)

Where did that closing parenthesis appear from?

This makes sense -- I'm still on Beta 6 despite the bugginess, but it definitely is buggy. I keep trying to customize the button layout (like adding a history button, or moving the new tab button) and it mysteriously reverts parts of the layout to default when I change it, but not every time, and not every button. Odd. Also, Windows Live Mail is nearly unuseable.

The main reason I'm sticking with it for now is Panorama. Bound the hotkey for that to one of my extra mouse buttons (mine has ~9). As far as I'm concerned there's no other way to do tabs/grouping anymore.

The big thing I wish they'd do is lazy load the tab groups that weren't active the last time it got closed. I have about 10 tabs open now at all times, and it doesn't make sense to try to load them all at once. Panorama could basically merge tabs/bookmarks/history all in one and revolutionize the UI, but for now it's still awesome but kind of slow.

edit: I just turned on HW acceleration (windows only sorry), and the performance boost is pretty amazing.

I have been using "Firefox 4.0b8pre" (with Jaegermonkey!) for weeks. It's really been a pleasant experience, fast load times, nice UI, and few if any major bugs. Perhaps I just caught a good nightly, but nonetheless, this news then comes as surprising to me.

I worry about delaying the Firefox release until next year (where FF4 seems as much about catching up to the competition as it is new features), but if it allows this chart to cross the green line, then I'd say that would be some huge bragging rights:

http://arewefastyet.com/

I'm also using Minefield 4.0b8pre as my primary browser and always look for new "nightly" update with hoping it solves the annoying bug: location bar doesn't synchronize with the displaying page/tab. Other than that, FF 4 has a very nice looking UI and it's fast.

I'm not sure what threshold of bugginess would need to be crossed before I give up this Panorama feature, but it's pretty damn high.

I think this is a good thing. I tried Beta 6 just a few hours a go and it is full of issues that stopped me getting back to a workable state (using Firefox Sync). Reverted to 3 and all is good again. They still have some kinks to iron out I guess.

Is it just me or is Firefox's quality actually degrading ? I have been using Firefox since 1.0 and it was a really welcome change compared to IE. But now compared to Chrome

* Its load times are ridiculously high compared to Chrome

* Sometimes when my netflix window freezes up, it takes down the whole browser with it (though I know its running in a separate process)

* Opening downthemall's manager window makes for whole browser unresponsive for a few seconds

* Detaching a tab reloads it (unlike chrome or ie9)

The only reason I still use firefox is because of firebug and downthemall.

It depends which version of Firefox you are talking about, but based upon 4.08Pre which I am currently running -

Load times are fast and javascript speed is very similar, if not better than Chrome [1]

Currently, only the mobile version of Firefox will have tab separation in the form of the electrolysis project for the upcoming version. Plugins do currently run independently of the browser process.

Extensions in Firefox are a lot more powerful; they can slow things down and cause memory leaks.

In the latest prerelease, pages and their plugins do not reload when detached.

[1] http://arewefastyet.com

edit: Disabling the javascript features of firebug allows Firefox to use its jit tracing leading to faster javascript speeds.

It's so strange to hear people say this. I'm running FF 3.6 on Ubuntu 10.04 x64, and its performance is comparable to Chrome. Chrome's a tad faster, but not significantly so, while FF is actually more stable with tons of windows open (~45+). Flash crashes about equally in both (and worse in Opera 10), although not so frequently as to be unusable.

FF is actually so good I switched from Chrome/Chromium to FF a few months ago (mainly for Vimperator though, but the performance differences were marginal enough not to matter). I can't help but wonder if 64bit Linux is FF's optimal platform, with its performance dropping off on Windows and maybe Mac? What OS are you guys running it on?

This isn’t an excuse for your Fx speed problems, but have you tried starting it in safe mode? If you’ve been using the same profile since 1.0 then it’s probably quite unhappy.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

If that makes things much better for you then you can create a new profile and migrate a few things over. And yeah, Mozilla should really fix this problem.

Well I've been using Firefox since back when it was called phoenix. :P Not that that's even remotely relevant.

Chrome is my default browser but FF 4 is a worthy contender. Using FF 3.5 seems like taking a step back in time, but FF 4 feels very fast, responsive, and is more usable than ever. When it's released it'll put Firefox back in the game.

I'm using ff4b6 right now.

Firefox's page loading speed (especially with ff4b) isn't actually noticeably slower on most sites than Chrome. Until Mr Flash and other plugins come around. That's probably what makes FF feel so horrible right now. Flash video just kills FF performance (just having the video paused in another tab) like nothing else. They seriously need to fix the flash problem. Having flash crash and bringing down my whole browser sucks.

Aside from that, downthemall's problem is the plug in itself. There's definitely something wrong with how the plug in is written, not FF itself. And I believe FF4 tears tabs correctly now.

> Having flash crash and bringing down my whole browser sucks.

haven't OOPPs (out of process plugins) been released since ff3.6?

I thought they were, so now there's a process called plugin-container.exe, I'm guessing one for each different type of plugin, and if that crashes or stalls, FF still goes down (or stalls).

I understand FF 4 beta 6 is crashing like mad on me :(

I've had to use chrome for most of my browsing because 3 is too slow now that I've tried 4 but every time my laptop goes to sleep and also randomly throughout the day it crashes.

I'm a pretty heavy user though I keep 30 - 40+ tabs open on the regular

In the meanwhile Google Chrome is gaining more and more usage share... isn't that the way IE dominated the market? Netscape delayed the versions because they were creating a super Netscape Browser/Navigator?

Chrome bumps version numbers for almost no reason. Not that that’s bad, but I don’t think release frequency was the biggest reason IE beat out Netscape. Consider the 5+ years between IE6 and IE7 where IE6 was still 80% of the market, for example…

Well I disagree man, this was the last release of chrome on October 19, 2010: http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/10/stable-chan... ... now Firefox, January 21st, 2010(it's been a while huh?) http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/ but is not only about the release time, look at the features, I can see more innovation in Chrome than Firefox and more faster.

Seeing as they have yet to make any improvements to the Linux interface, I'm willing to go right on with my current assumption. Chrome is the place to be.

Firefox extensions will keep me using it for a while until Chrome or IE can do better.

Firebug, Adblock Plus, NoScript, CS Lite (cookie management) and probably a couple others make my browsing/development much nicer/easier.

Chrome is faster enough than firefox that the pseudo adblock plus is more than sufficient and Chrome's built in dev tools easily rival Firebug. Not sure if there's cookie management, but then again, I run CCleaner regularly with just a few cookies exempted.

By the time they release Firefox 4, it will become totally irrelevant.