Firefox 4 beta 2 preaches tabs-on-top love to fanbois

"Chrome-like tabs-on-top feature"

You mean "Opera-like", right?

on linux

you can enable tabs-on-top under (I think) the 'View --> Tabs on Top' menu.

At least you could with the alpha I was running last week.

What you don't get is the fancy new UI that Windowsers have with the big back button and so on.

Another Operaism

Oh, when I think of all the rabid Firefox fanboys spouting venom at Opera over the years for being sooooo "line, toootally dumb, dude" to stick the tabs above the address bar. No doubt now they'll think it's all brilliant and makes much more sense that way, what with the URL reflecting the tab, especially when you tile or cascade your tabs and each one has its own independent address bar. Or haven't they implemented MDI in Firefox yet? It'll probably come in V5.

Can't figure out what app tab is for

As far as I can tell it just removes the title text from the tab. Other than that it appears to be a regular tab. You can still click on bookmarks or enter a url into the address field to navigate somewhere else.

I was expecting something such as a permanently anchored tab that always starts on one page and modifies the home button to return to that page (it doesn't), opens bookmarks in a different tab (it doesn't), and perhaps grays out the url field so you can't change your location (nope).

I'm not sure what its supposed to do but it feels incomplete. Given this is a second beta I would expect all features and functionality to be present if not necessarily bug free by this point.

Innovation

I remember the days when Mozilla were pretty close to the leading edge. For the last few years it seems all they can do is lift ideas from Opera and now Chrome. That wouldn't be so bad if they didn't try to present them as great new ideas. I suppose most of the Firefox fanbois (yes people other then Apple have their fanbois) probably will see it as innovative simply because they never try anything else. That's the thing about fanbois, it doesn't matter whether you're talking computer hardware or software, motorcycles or mobile phones, the fanbois are convinced that their chosen brand is better than every other brand but never even look at the other brands to compare.

Preaching to the converted is all well and good, but it never increased anybody's market share.

So, Firefox is turning into Opera?

I've been using Opera for the past few weeks, in an effort to like it, but everything still feels slightly alien (and it crashes a lot).

One of my favourite things about Firefox, was that I could make it near identical to IE. I don't think I ever had a good reason for switching from IE, other than some nagging worries about security (that, and the piece of mind gained by using a different browser from the rest of the family!).

Firefox button

Unless they changed it since Beta 1 that Firefox button takes up the width of a window anyways so not really sure why they decided to waste that amount of screen estate with it.

It's definitely quicker than 3.6 and eats less memory but I still don't want my tabs at the top.

Why does it insist on a fracking title!!??!!

2 Windows with 5 tabs = 205Mb; but then the one window and two tabs have been open and in use for about 12 hours.

FF4 loads very quickly, 3.6.8 takes about twice as long, but has a LOT more addons.

To the person moaning about start-up speed; what is your internet connection like?

FF checks for updates to all addons at start-up and if your connection is down or you need to activate it using a custom interface (like AOL or the crappy old Orange system with the Green Frog modem) it WILL take forever; FF will wait a long time before giving up on the update info.

PS

HATE tabs over address bar.

Change fot the sake of change

Tabs revolutionised browsing for me. Firefox's introduction of tabs was my final kicking out of MS IE (MS's later bleat of having them too fell on deaf ears).

Tabs Work Wonders.

Moving them makes no sense.

But hey, as long as there's a menu entry for it, or a configuration Mania entry, or Tabs Mix Pro... or some other add on.

Like many users, I have no desire whatsoever for Firefox to *ever* look any different. It's fine: leave it alone. Improve it's innards, not its looks.

Fanboy PS... Starts fast enough under Linux :)

The Microsoft excuse

"As for your memory complaints, if your PC has available memory then Firefox will make use of it."

Same excuse Microsoft used for Vista. When in reality, there was some caching but really just lots and lots of bloat. And really it's the same story with Firefox. It''d be a real disaster if apps all just started deciding "Hey, free RAM! Let's get bigger!"

There's settings for a certain amount of in-memory cache for items (the HTML, CSS, JPEG, etc. etc.), to keep from thrashing stuff in and out of the on-disk cache too much. There's also some cacheing for the page renderer and such. The item cache is settable via the preferences; the other settings are settable manually via about:config, but otherwise shrink a bit if you have like <128MB or maybe <64MB of RAM, and increase a bit up to like a 512MB system or so. But no, Firefox doesn't just see there's free RAM and start using it. It simply has some inefficient bits that use more RAM than they should, and some memory leaks.

Although, frankly, my systems have 512MB and I use lots of tabs, although Firefox bloats up in the case of Ubuntu the kernel seems to gently page out the unused stuff rather than having it actually slow me down anyway.

"FF checks for updates to all addons at start-up "

Yes, it does. And *THAT* is precisely what it should NOT be doing. Not as default behaviour or as the sole option for automatic update checking, anyway.

Checking for updates should happen some time when it doesn't conflict with what the interactive user is trying to do.

Two sensible options would be "When I close firefox" (the update checking could happen at low priority after the user interface closes) or "when I shut down or log off shut down windows" (obviously, power off is delayed until the update check completes, so the user doesn't have to stand and wait).

The same options should apply to all antivirus scans and anything else that ought to happen behind the scenes -- they should never, ever, take precedence over what the interactive user is trying to do.

I did once find a program that can execute other programs on windows shutdown, but that presumes that there's a command line option to perform the necessary action, which isn't always the case.

Oops

"You seem to be suggesting that virus scanning a file when you open it is a bad idea"

No, I'm meaning the whole drive scan, which can take an hour or more and tends to substantially slow the machine if it starts running while you're doing something else. Especially if at the same time the machine decides to start downloading windows updates and simultaneously lets umpteen programs check for updates over a slow wireless broadband. Which you didn't want to do anyway, because they use up expensive airtime and could be done faster and for free when you arrive at your destination and can plug the machine into the LAN.