Firefox 4.0 RC1

Good morning people. It’s the Angry Systems Administrator with another technology report. This morning, I’m going to give my first impressions of the new version of Firefox.

I downloaded the portable version of Firefox 4.0 last week to see how it looked and how many of my add ons and themes didn’t work. My first thought when I saw the new interface was Ick! I didn’t like the default theme. I promptly started looking on how to get my favorite one. Yeah, the programmers must have worked at Microsoft. They changed the options interface big time.

This meant a pretty steel learning curve as I tried to figure out things. I’ve pretty much got that under control so I went in search of plugins and themes. As expected, none of the themes I like are supported and a large number of plugins don’t work either.

Well, I have ways around these small issues, one of which is MozBackup. I’ve been using this utility to backup Mozilla products for quite a while now. It’s a useful, free program that backs up your settings, plugins, and in the case of Thunderbird, email. It will also restore everything for you. Very handy when moving to a new computer or rebuilding an old one.

I used that and all my settings migrated. However, none of my themes worked and half the plugins didn’t work either. What really hurt was my Mr. Tech plugin. I use that to force plugins to work. (In most cases all that’s needed is a change in the revision numbers in the plugins) Hopefully the plugins and themes will be updated soon.

Now for the meat of the matter. How does it perform?

So far, so good. It does seem to render web sites much faster then the older FF 3.x versions. I’ve heard about various benchmarks saying that Chrome is faster or IE 9 is faster, but that matters not to me. I don’t have IE9 and can’t get it with my current version of Windows and I don’t use Chrome all that much.

One test I use is the Anger Central main site. The java app we use for the quotes does tend to slow things down a bit. Also there are the apps for the ads and the twitter feeds. In FF4 they load far faster then under the other browsers I have. I’ve also seen this in other web sites as well. Stability seems ok, however I haven’t tested it yet for memory usage. At a glance, it doesn’t seem to have the problem of previous versions.

Mozilla has stated that they will release the final production version in a week or so unless they run into a show stopper. I’m going to hold off installing the full version until all the plugins and themes I prefer have been updated to work on the new version.

So do I recommend you update when the new version comes out?

Yes, I do. As long as you are aware that not all your plugins and themes may work, and that the developers of those themes and plugins may not bother updating their tools, you should not have a problem. I plan to continue using the older version, which is a full install, and use the portable version until I’m fully comfortable with it. Once I am I’ll upgrade all the copies on the Anger Central systems.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~