Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button. And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.
It also now uses an OSS library, HarfBuzz, to position the glyphs.
The kerning problem is well documented, e.g., see here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=21588...
> Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button.
Sure, you can get the list either way, but why change from the widespread convention of having a down-arrow for a drop-down list as earlier versions did? The newer version is less discoverable, and making that sort of change without a good reason is just poor usability, pure and simple.
> And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.
I hadn't even realised Firefox 4 still had such a Customize option until you mentioned it. To activate it, I have to navigate my mouse cursor to a region about 3-4px wide (on my 1920x1200 screen) between some of the areas on the bar, and right-click, even if the mouse cursor has already changed to the left-right arrow in some of those places. Once again, this is just poor usability (as is moving the buttons around in the first place when upgrading from an existing Firefox 3 installation that had them in a different place where they could still go).
That's interesting, because every other browser I've ever used on my WinXP system (including Firefox up to 3.6) could display a 'T' followed by another letter without screwing up the positioning, as can every other piece of software I use on the system for that matter.
I suspect you are mistaken, and Firefox 4 is actually using something other than vanilla Windows typography where it didn't before.
> Like what [terrible usability issues]?
Well, just off the top of my head...
They messed up just about everything on the address/history/awesome/whatever bar: refresh is now a tiny button on the other side of the screen, home is even further over squashed between icons for extensions, you are supposed to realise (presumably through some divine revelation) that holding down the mouse button over the back icon is how you jump back by more than one page, there is a tiny, almost invisible arrow on the right of the tab line that shows all tabs and lets you open a Tab Groups page with a weird UI that doesn't fit in at all, etc.
They moved "Bookmark all tabs" from an obvious place on the Bookmarks menu to the context menu when you right-click a single tab. (A Google for "Firefox 4" "bookmark all tabs" currently returns nearly 30,000 hits.)
Go to Tools|Add-ons with nothing open and you have no obvious way back to a regular browser tab.
Autocomplete of password fields on forms seems to be unreliable.
I'll stop there, because I think the point is made well enough.