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Use Firefox4 (Read 6976 times)

MrMagoo

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Use Firefox4
Mar 31^st, 2011 at 1:59am

Rad,

Regarding your post:

"Wish I could install it on my own laptop, but IE9 does not support Windows XP (.. and never will). Lots of people are still using WXP, I hear (44%)."

Firefox 4 was just released last week, and is a fantastic browser. I've been using it since the early betas, and love it. It's been holding its own in every review against IE9 and Chrome, and Mozilla put lots of effort into making sure they could support it on WinXP.

When Chrome first came out, I liked it better than Firefox 3.x because of the minimalist interface and raw speed. Firefox 4 has now matched the speed and (in my opinion) bested the interface. (I sometimes have trouble finding the menu options I'm looking for in Chrome because their menus are too minimal.)

Full disclosure: I've been working for Mozilla for about a month now, but I've been using Firefox since it broke the browser monopoly back in the day.

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MrMagoo

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Re: Use Firefox4
Reply #1 - Mar 31^st, 2011 at 2:02am

Off the topic of browsers but weighing in on other questions in your post:

"Only thing I couldnt decide on was a firewall. Those tend to take a little expertise to manage, and Big Al aint a geek. Any ideas on a good firewall for non-geeks?"

The firewall built in to Win7 is the easiest out there to use and sufficient security for basic usage.

"What do you guys think of Open Office? Version 3.3 was released a couple months ago."

I like it. Some people complain that it doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it gets the job done for me, and its free.

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Rad

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Re: Use Firefox4
Reply #2 - Mar 31^st, 2011 at 11:46pm

thanks, bro.

yes, i enabled the default win7 firewall for him.

good to know about open office. ms office has so many features i doubt any mere mortal could use them all.

i am currently using firefox 3.6.16. the upgrade to 4.0 is available, but none of my add-ons work with it yet, so i will wait another week or two and try again.

i was surprised to se ff4 said "6x faster than ff3.6" seems like an exaggeration, no?

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MrMagoo

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Re: Use Firefox4
Reply #3 - Apr 2^nd, 2011 at 8:22pm

Rad wrote on Mar 31^st, 2011 at 11:46pm:

was surprised to se ff4 said "6x faster than ff3.6" seems like an exaggeration, no?

No. They have benchmarks they used to come up with that number. They put a ton of work into optimizing the new version. Most of the work went into the new Javascript engine, which is where Chrome has always shined. FF4 is now on parity w/ Chrome's javascript performance. The devs also optimized start-up time and added hardware acceleration for rendering.

Incidentally, hardware acceleration is where IE9 differs. MS went for Direct2D acceleration, which gives better performance but isn't available in WinXP and below. FF4 went with Direct3D, which is available in WinXP. I think Chrome is on the same path of using Direct3D.

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