IE6 had plugins. I know this well 'cause a crapton of viruses were installed as IE plugins, and I've spent a lot of time cleaning computers of the wretched things (not mine - I really don't know how people kept getting tricked into installing the things). But neither it nor the later versions have the exact same plugins as Firefox.

 

Also on 3.6 myself. From what I've seen, the new site shouldn't have any problems with it. The only real difficulty it gives me is it's habit of eating obscene amounts of RAM, then when it reaches a certain upper figure, it stops allocating more and starts chewing up CPU power instead. For whatever reason, it's far more sluggish under Windows 7 then XP, though it used to be worse then it is today (still the occasional 3.6 patch here and there).

 

From what I've been reading this should've finally been fixed in FF10, but my gut feeling is that it hasn't, and I also don't like the idea of an interface change.

 

On the other hand, every now and then I get to see a machine running a current version of IE. To my amazement, that's even worse: Leave a few windows open long enough and it'll slow the entire system down, as each one tends to end up with its own thread, and each thread will eventually take over an entire core (whereas Firefox always runs in a single thread).

 

(Having a single thread go haywire usually isn't noticeable these days, as multi-core processors mean that only one core ends up getting thrashed - the others are still free, so the computer can just use those to deal with whatever else you ask it to do. If you've got more threads demanding maximum CPU power then you have cores to accommodate, everything grinds to a halt).

You guys do realise we're on FF11 now right? (Ridiculous version numbering system aside - I know, we went from 4 to 11 in a very short space of time).

 

Don't fear the change - you can bring the menu bar back permanently by right-clicking on the top of the browser and you're back in familiar territory again. I'm also slightly confused as to how much benefit the status bar is - it's visible in the bottom-right anyway whenever you hover over a link or change pages (shows whilst loading).

 

Less clutter on the screen is good

 

Plus I love Firefox sync. I occasionally upgrade my PC - be it reinstalling or upgrading an OS, or getting a new computer or even switching from laptop to desktop, I now take my bookmarks with me. Not a hugely important feature, but I'm always forgetting to backup my bookmarks so the fact that I no longer have to remember is a bonus.

Plus I love Firefox sync. I occasionally upgrade my PC - be it reinstalling or upgrading an OS, or getting a new computer or even switching from laptop to desktop, I now take my bookmarks with me. Not a hugely important feature, but I'm always forgetting to backup my bookmarks so the fact that I no longer have to remember is a bonus.

 

I do that with Google Chrome by syncing to my google account

I use both Xmarks and Firefox Sync. Just to be sure I have all my stuff when I need it. But I won't, yet, use FF on my main desktop with XP on it.

I notice FF has nicked Chrome's most visited webpages idea when you open a new tab? Cool!

I notice FF has nicked Chrome's most visited webpages idea when you open a new tab? Cool!

 

You know Opera did it years before with Speed Dial, right?

I had forgotten that, haven't used Opera in years! All hail Opera!

*hugs his IE*

There is a speed dial plug in for firefox and IE. Or there was one. I've not seen it in a while.

Been on Chrome for over a year. Just got fed up with the memory hogging in FF and jumped ship.

I might have, too, but I hate Google's policy of late.

Today at work I had flash update and now my FF doesn't play youtube... All would be fine if I didn't have to use Firebug. Yes I know I can have it on others but clearly on FF it is much better.

I believe that FF should not be allowed to make another version, which is up to 13, without major changes. Get is slimmer, meaner, and better. Oh, and keep the look of FF 3.x as well. 4+ looks like junk

What's their rational for going with entire version numbers for point-oh-one bug fixes anyway? Say what you will about Microsoft, but they don't go up entire version numbers for every minor patch.

I think they said once why the do it. You can ask google why their putting +1 to every chrome edition.

What's their rational for going with entire version numbers for point-oh-one bug fixes anyway? Say what you will about Microsoft, but they don't go up entire version numbers for every minor patch.

 

The simple explanation is because Chrome was doing it and Opera had legitimately reached a high number anyway (9 by the time FF started to do it as well) they perhaps thought that they would look like an older product.

 

I think they're just pandering to the masses who don't know what version numbers actually mean, which is silly.

 

--

 

I think v4 looks better than v3 though - much cleaner. Nobody can ever win that argument though - it's a preference and at the end of the day you eventually have to upgrade (well, there are ways of sticking with older browsers for many years of course, but you do miss out on new things - for example when Flash goes the way of the dodo and everything's rendered in HTML5 elements for video, music and the increasing number of browser games, many older browsers will just cease to display video on a lot of websites).

I think they're just pandering to the masses who don't know what version numbers actually mean, which is silly.

Except this just makes them look like the silly ones who have no idea what numbers mean.

Well you can do it this way that this is FF 4.x where x is the current release version

To me, it's all FF 4.xx.xxxx Nothing has really changed since Firefox 4. Maybe some security stuff, but not speed, or anything else.

Well it makes them look silly to those that know better, but to new users who don't know better it makes them look very advanced.

So about a month or so ago I finally gave in and upgraded to Firefox 12, on the basis that I had to do it sooner or later. Naturally about a week later 13 hit so I'm on that now.

 

Memory management is greatly improved under Windows 7. It's bad under XP. Oddly enough it was the other way around with earlier releases.

 

How bad is it under XP? Well, I would get up to about a gig worth of usage, then try to close the browser. I watched the thread slowly release memory until it got down to about 10mb. Then it started to go up again. Eventually, after about 15-20 minutes of this fun, it made it all the way up to the 1gb mark again and sat there; at which I point I got sick of it and killed the thread.

 

Because of this it took three Firefox restarts before I discovered that it no longer remembers your tabs when you re-open it. It appears it doesn't care what you do in General prefs. Killing the process makes it think the browser crashed, which DOES trigger tab restoration on the next launch...

 

When forcing restoration in this manner it no longer automatically loads the content for the tabs until you manually go through and click on each one of them. The idea seems to be to make the tab you're on load faster, but it would be nice if it got around to doing them all when the current tab was ready.

 

Buttons and things have been moved around for no good reason, but whatever, I've pretty much learned the new layout by now.

 

Gripes aside, there's one new feature that I'd been thinking of looking for an extension for, and its inclusion really does make the upgrade worthwhile for me: When you go to save a file from a web page, the browser defaults to the folder you last saved files to from that page. It'll track this even between different areas on the same domain.

 

I know this sounds silly and minor but when it comes to saving web comics this probably chops at last a minute or two off the time it would otherwise take me each day. My comics folder has something like sixty thousand images in it. Having to browse this structure is slow, even after applying a certain registry tweak required for maintaining your sanity when dealing with such large file counts.

 

So yeah, I'm really happy with that.