Waiting for Firefox 4

I remem­ber that when I was younger I used to play and fid­dle with any new beta that came out.

Back then, when I had a lot more time on my hands and red­dit didn’t exist, a new ver­sion of an upris­ing browser named Fire­fox was releas­ing in late Novem­ber, that was Fire­fox 1.5, code­named Deerpark.

A few months before the release, an alpha was released, and imme­di­etly I started play­ing with it, although it was barely usable, the new fea­tures and improve­ments that came with 1.5 were awe­some. I felt the same kind of rush that you feel when you know you’re get­ting a present that you really want.

With the new release of Fire­fox 4, I feel exactly the same, after almost 5 years of not hav­ing that feel­ing. I’m wait­ing for a browser to be released in it’s final version.

Daily Use

I’ve stopped using Fire­fox as my main browser a while ago, at least 6 months now. I’m using using Fire­fox at work, where I need the pow­er­ful and very com­fort­able Fire­bug, but for brows­ing and web apps, I can’t work with any­thing but Chrome.

The main two fea­tures that keep me from using Fire­fox as my per­sonal browser is speed, and the abil­ity to detach tabs & cre­ate Appli­ca­tion Shurt­cuts.

Chromes Appli­ca­tion Short­cuts com­bined with a few neat global key­board hotkeys released me from most of the desk­top apps

I have a setup that allow me to launch Gmail using Win Key+G, and it loads instantly, I don’t mean it loads in under 10 sec­onds, it’s ready the sec­ond the win­dow dec­o­ra­tions are ready and the win­dow is fully opened (Win 7 has a small ani­ma­tion of a win­dow fad­ing in).

Although I still have lots of desk­top appli­ca­tion, most of my work on the com­puter is done using web apps, from project man­age­ment to music, I got so used to Gmail that I can barely stand using Out­look while at work. Today I’m prac­ti­cally addicted to Chrome. I’ve tried other browsers, but Chrome usu­ally gets me back after a very short time.

Chrome is blaz­ing fast, and it’s always there, no mat­ter how long the win­dow was open, or what runs on it and almost never crashes. It has a few advan­tages, but those advan­tages should be picked up by browser ven­dors pretty quickly. Opera is pretty neat, and Webkit is nice also, but Fire­fox, with it’s huge repos­i­tory of exten­sions and the almost never end­ing way of cus­tomiza­tion is lag­ging behind, and I don’t care what the hypesters will say.

Fire­fox is laggy & slow, a mem­ory hog, Yes, I have exten­sions, and don’t tell me to unin­stall a few, and it’s not the fault of Fire­fox, because it is, it should be able to man­age the exten­sions it allows you to install instead of blam­ing poor per­for­mance on the exten­sion. Firefox’s Exten­sions are it’s power, and that what made it famous, and made us all use it in the first place.

Hopes and Dreams

I really hope that Fire­fox 4 will be all that it’s promised to be, I have a lot more dreams I would like to imple­ment natively in Fire­fox, but the two main fea­tures I’m wait­ing for are Real speed improve­ment, and the abil­ity to drag tabs out of the win­dow and cre­at­ing a new win­dow with­out killing the page or refresh­ing it and cre­at­ing appli­ca­tion short­cuts. With­out those two I can’t really live at the moment.

But if you allow me to really dream for a moment, these fea­tures I really hope that will be imple­mented and will be actu­ally work­ing: Plu­gin mem­ory man­age­ment, Abil­ity to cus­tomize book­marks tool­bar, a few improve­ments to the awesome-bar with bet­ter search­ing (again, related to bookmarks).

As it looks at the moment, Fire­fox is still in beta, and I’m not stat­ing the obvi­ous, because for Fire­fox 1.5, 2, and 3, beta ver­sions were pretty sta­ble releases, and were prac­ti­cally usable, but with the cur­rent beta ver­sion, it feels like the only thing was changed is the UI, and that sucks some­how, because I was expect­ing to see the fire­works, but noth­ing really works, or wasn’t imple­mented yet.

I really hope that Fire­fox 4 will be at least as good as Chrome, it really can, just make sure you don’t go into a stag­na­tion due to your size, make bold steps, Fire­fox, please go back to Mak­ing the Web bet­ter.