infoTECH Feature

April 04, 2011

A Look at Firefox 4

Mozilla recently upgraded its Firefox browser to version 4.0. As with Microsoft’s (News - Alert) new Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 offers a somewhat different look and feel on the surface as well as several improvements under the hood. For businesses or individuals who already use or are considering deploying Firefox, here’s a quick look at what you’ll find in the new edition.

If you’re using a prior version of Firefox, you can easily upgrade to Firefox 4.0 by clicking on the Help menu and selecting the option to Check for Updates. In return, the browser will provide a link to download the new version. You can also go directly to the source for FF 4 at the Mozilla website.

Joining IE9 in borrowing a page from Google (News - Alert) Chrome, Firefox 4 sports a more streamlined look, especially at the top. By default, FF 4 displays only your Navigation bar and tabs for each open web page. The Navigation bar has been tweaked so that it still offers the same features. But by moving, combining, and shrinking certain icons, the toolbar now takes up less space. You can still display your Menu bar and Bookmarks bar should you wish, but you may find less reason to do so.

Should you opt to turn off the Menu bar, the browser displays a “Firefox” button in the upper left corner from which you can access many of the common commands as well as your bookmarks, history list, add-ons, options and Help menu. A new Pin as App tab lets you create shortcuts to frequently used sites, which appear to the left of any pages you currently have open. I found that feature to be a nice alternative to maintaining a separate Bookmarks toolbar.

The toolbars are also infinitely customizable. You can not only choose which ones to turn on and off but also change their position as well as add and move specific buttons.

A new Paranoma mode lets you display large thumbnails of all your open Web pages in one screen. To kick off this feature, click on the small down arrow that appears at the end of your tab row and select the Tab Groups command (or simply press Ctrl-Shift-E). From the thumbnails that appear for each page, just click on the page you wish to view. You can even search for specific pages by name and give your tab group a specific name. I found this a handy option for those times when I’ve got a dozen different pages open and have lost track of specific ones.

You can further customize the look and feel of FF 4 with different themes. On my laptop, the default theme built into Firefox didn’t blend in well against my desktop background. After searching at the themes page, I found one that looked better and was more readable.

Beyond the mere look and feel, Firefox 4 is faster. Mozilla (News - Alert) claims that the new browser is up to six times faster than the previous release, offering quicker startup and page load times. I didn’t do any official benchmark testing, but general page loads did seem a bit speedier than what I’ve experienced in the past. The new version also supports hardware acceleration, which taps into certain graphics card to speed up the performance of different websites.

Compatible with Windows (any version from Windows 2000 to Windows 7), Mac OS X 10.5 or higher, and Linux, Firefox 4 is also available in 80 different languages.

Beyond the new desktop version of Firefox, Mozilla also just released a new mobile edition of the browser for Android devices and Nokia’s Maemo platform. The mobile version offers some of the same features found in the desktop edition, such as bookmarks, tabs, a download manager, and a password manager. Using the Firefox Sync feature, you can maintain and synchronize the same bookmarks, tabs, passwords, and history across the desktop and mobile products. And as with the desktop version, you can install different add-ons to Firefox mobile.


Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Janice McDuffee
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