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Abyssalstudios1

Firefox 4 beta

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I've been using Chrome for a while, but I've decided that I want to use some plugins for my browsing. So I switched back to Firefox. But not the current version; I decided to give Firefox 4 a run.

It looks like most of the updates are under the hood. Most of the options are gone. They have been replaced with a single orange "Firefox" button that houses all of the "New Tab", "Start Private Browsing", "History" etc options. There is no dedicated refresh or cancel button any more. One button to the immediate right of the address bar performs those functions depending on if a page is loading or not. One thing that is currently irritating me: typing a search term into the URL bar does perform a web search a la Chrome (I dunno if this was in 3), but it searches with Bing instead. I haven't looked very hard into changing this, though. And the old web search bar is still there.

The removal of an entire row of buttons frees up more room for viewing space, which is of course the whole point of web browsing. A quick look at the Firefox 4 beta page tells me that most of the changes include updated standards and improved security.

So, Firefox 4 seems to keep everything that we knew and enjoyed from Firefox 3, with a slight visual makeover.

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I keep swapping between the two, and have been meaning to give the latest Firefox beta a try. A few sites I've been on act weird under Chrome, which is one reason I tend to switch back. It also has a tendency to crash under Linux when you try to select an image to upload to a site. It also runs a bit better on my netbook.

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There should be a way to restore the default search to Google. Mine doesn't search with Bing (what a piece of shit, by the way.)

I highly suggest using the nightly builds (beta 8) and not the "official" beta, as it is FAST and have fixed a lot of the things broken in beta 6.

FF4 kicks ass. It is nowhere near as bloated and lame as 3.x, this is what will let Mozilla steal back the title of "coolest browser" from Google.

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While that's all great, I still have to laugh any time that a major software version release claims it will have improved security. At most it'll have some kind of feature like process separation or other over-hyped things of the past which will be publicly cracked at the next Defcon. In the meanwhile there will be tons of new buffer overflows, heap corruptions, etc. to exploit because there is no team of programmers/testers on Earth that consistently test at a rate that will find such things which can keep up with the rate at which they make changes to the code. It takes an exponentially greater amount of effort to verify security than it takes to change program code :P

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Google Chrome actually has a program where Google pays whitehats a lotta dough to find exploits defcon/pwn2own style. :3

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I'd been using the nightlies for years but 4.0 really sucks. I used it for a few months before giving it up and using the standard version. I have no idea what the hell they were thinking. The context menu is particularly fucked up. They added things I'd have no interest in ever using while getting rid of such commonsense items as "new tab". What the hell. If they don't fix it before the general release I'll have to start using a fork. Or Chrome.

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Sounds like they took the reasons I still use Firefox on occasion and made them to be like Chrome. Then again the only reason I really run it anymore is if Chrome doesn't like an application.

But yeah, I didn't think I could use Chrome regularly without NoScript but I found this page which has some really good addons on it.

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