Firefox 4 Review

Firefox 4 is finally out and after the long beta process it has reached golden master situation. With over 80 million downloads it is for obvious a success. They have implemented a lot of fresh features that the other browsers were already using like tabs on top, but it is Firefox so you can rely on it being stable.



Features



App Tab



To activate "app tab" you honest click on an initiate tab and click pin tab. It pins a mini tab that dynamically updates with a soft glow if you got a message on some services like Gmail or Twitter.



Tabs on Top



Tabs on top is nothing unique but it is unusual to Firefox. They slash clutter and are easier to manage. You can peaceful have the tabs on the bottom if you want you objective have to edit it it the preferences menu.



Customization



You can now completely customize Firefox. Any of the menu elements can be dragged and dropped to where you want them. This allows you to change Firefox to meet your needs.



html5 Support



Firefox version 4 has a 100 point increase on the html5 test from its predecessor Firefox 3.5. This is suitable but is aloof lacking compared to the other webkit browsers. Google Chrome stable scored 288. You can compare these tests yourself if you want at html5test.com.



CSS3 Support



Firefox has substantially updated their CSS3 back with help for: CSS Transitions, -moz-calc(), -moz-any(), -moz-element(), -moz-placeholder(), Border Radius, box-shadow, -moz-font-feature-settings, device-pixel-ratio, -moz-tab-size, -moz-focusring, -moz-image-rect, Resizable Text Areas, and they added benefit for a whole slew of recent API's.



Speed



Firefox has updated its gecko rendering engine but it is unruffled not as like a flash as webkit. Here is the scores from the SunSpider 0.9.1 Javascript Test:



Firefox



RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
Total: 306.3ms +/- 1.1%



3d: 50.6ms +/- 1.9% cube: 20.4ms +/- 1.8% morph: 9.1ms +/- 2.5% raytrace: 21.1ms +/- 4.6%



access: 47.7ms +/- 1.4% binary-trees: 5.7ms +/- 8.5% fannkuch: 23.1ms +/- 1.0% nbody: 7.9ms +/- 2.9% nsieve: 11.0ms +/- 0.0%



bitops: 20.7ms +/- 2.8% 3bit-bits-in-byte: 0.9ms +/- 25.1% bits-in-byte: 11.0ms +/- 0.0% bitwise-and: 2.3ms +/- 15.0% nsieve-bits: 6.5ms +/- 5.8%



controlflow: 3.4ms +/- 10.9% recursive: 3.4ms +/- 10.9%



crypto: 23.0ms +/- 2.9% aes: 12.4ms +/- 4.0% md5: 6.4ms +/- 5.8% sha1: 4.2ms +/- 7.2%



date: 38.0ms +/- 2.2% format-tofte: 25.4ms +/- 2.4% format-xparb: 12.6ms +/- 4.0%



math: 29.3ms +/- 5.1% cordic: 7.0ms +/- 0.0% partial-sums: 13.9ms +/- 7.8% spectral-norm: 8.4ms +/- 5.9%



regexp: 16.6ms +/- 2.2% dna: 16.6ms +/- 2.2%



string: 77.0ms +/- 1.3% base64: 5.2ms +/- 5.8% fasta: 15.7ms +/- 2.2% tagcloud: 22.1ms +/- 2.4% unpack-code: 26.0ms +/- 1.8% validate-input: 8.0ms +/- 4.2%



Google Chrome



RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
Total: 323.8ms +/- 2.2%



3d: 49.9ms +/- 7.1% cube: 18.1ms +/- 19.0% morph: 13.8ms +/- 10.0% raytrace: 18.0ms +/- 9.0%



access: 35.7ms +/- 11.8% binary-trees: 2.5ms +/- 15.1% fannkuch: 18.0ms +/- 22.3% nbody: 10.3ms +/- 7.4% nsieve: 4.9ms +/- 27.0%



bitops: 28.8ms +/- 4.2% 3bit-bits-in-byte: 3.2ms +/- 29.4% bits-in-byte: 6.9ms +/- 7.6% bitwise-and: 10.4ms +/- 4.8% nsieve-bits: 8.3ms +/- 4.2%



controlflow: 4.4ms +/- 8.4% recursive: 4.4ms +/- 8.4%



crypto: 31.3ms +/- 4.4% aes: 10.7ms +/- 3.2% md5: 11.3ms +/- 3.1% sha1: 9.3ms +/- 16.6%



date: 28.9ms +/- 3.6% format-tofte: 13.7ms +/- 3.5% format-xparb: 15.2ms +/- 7.6%



math: 28.4ms +/- 9.4% cordic: 5.0ms +/- 32.3% partial-sums: 16.5ms +/- 9.2% spectral-norm: 6.9ms +/- 15.8%



regexp: 12.7ms +/- 3.8% dna: 12.7ms +/- 3.8%



string: 103.7ms +/- 1.5% base64: 6.6ms +/- 5.6% fasta: 15.8ms +/- 2.9% tagcloud: 27.4ms +/- 1.3% unpack-code: 37.0ms +/- 1.3% validate-input: 16.9ms +/- 6.4%



Pros: superb customization built in Stable Borrowed marvelous features from other browsers Cons: Slower than other browsers dreary attend of html5 and CSS3 peaceful uses Gecko Rendering Engine SCORE: 6/10