Firefox 3 beta 4 is out

[noelfirl]

...I have no retort. Good. Sit, Bobo, Sit. Good dog.

Although it sounded that way, it was actually Ubu. Thinking back, I suppose the Ubu on the endcap should have given it away at the time.

/annoying smartarse

[lukey]

Tsk @ my half-arsed pop culture references.

[Dr Lobster*]

beta 5 has just landed. seems even faster and there are some nice tweaks to the interface.

[Pete]

the reason its faster is because instead of allowing 2 simultaneous connections it now allows six by default. apparently ajaxy things will benefit from this in particular.

[cdd]

Interesting. If it genuinely looks better under Vista I may have to try it.

[Pete]

Interesting. If it genuinely looks better under Vista I may have to try it.

The theme isn't finished but there are more and more vistaish bits appearing.

[cdd]

Interesting. If it genuinely looks better under Vista I may have to try it.

The theme isn't finished but there are more and more vistaish bits appearing.

Well my main problem with it (as I might have said before) is the fact that Firefox doesn't seem to value vertical screen space. I generally want to scroll as little as possible, and since my screen doesn't have a huge number of vertical viewing pixels I don't take kindly to toolbars and tab bars and things wasting that precious viewing space. I dislike how Firefox deems tabs worthy of a brand new bar and prefer IE's approach of sharing the tab bar with the command bar. I also loathe File, Edit, View menu bars (and under Vista you won't find them visible by default in any mainstream MS application) and so it annoys me that Firefox 3 still has these bars and makes users rely on them for various things whereas IE7's interface has been redesigned to make them mostly unnecessary. Also while I do like the rather OSX idea of dragging text actually showing the dragged text, under Vista this looks absolutely hideous. Also the menu bars momenarily display a 2x2px white square before appearing properly on my computer before appearing once clicked, which is minor but vaguely irritating and just shows carelessness and a lack of attention to detail.

I know the theme isn't finished but I can say for certain that hideous solid light blue/gray ish colour used on the menus when run under Vista is horrid. I also object to searching for themes since I hate having to make that choice and think it should all look nice out of the box.

[Pete]

I can't stand the bookmarks toolbar myself. I find the fact that appears by default infuriating, however have rectified the problem by simply dragging the buttons in between the URL and Google boxes and renamed them to [null] so they just show as a group of favicons. lovely.

[cdd]

Wow, just tried that and it is fantastic. I always turn off bookmarks bars in browsers because they are hideous and waste space but I love this.

I also like one-click bookmarking.

[Dr Lobster*]

there is a hide menu bar extension on amo which gives the firefox menu bar the same behaviour as ie7, (hidden by default, alt to show). in normal use, you never need to access it so it gives you a bit more space. it is a bit disappointing this functionality isn't there 'out of the box', but still.

[Charlie Wells]

Beta 5 is now out and the home button is back.