Firefox 4.0 catching up to Google Chrome

I’ve installed the beta of Firefox 4.0 and have to say I really like it:

It feels a lot faster. And when the new javascript engine lands in september it should even be faster
The UI is cleaner, it has tabs on top (for now only on Windows, but Linux should be there in the next beta)

On Windows Firefox actually visually resembles Google Chrome quite a bit. Furthermore in following beta application specific tabs will be added. If Firefox continues like this it can maybe stop the fact that people leave Firefox now and start using Chrome because it’s faster.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 15:25 and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Firefox 4.0 catching up to Google Chrome”

Jaroslav Smid says:

July 17, 2010 at 15:39

Tabs on top has linux version either. I think it was deactivated by default and needs to be activated in view menu. UI on linux is still broken though – it still doesn’t respect gtk-enable-mnemonic, gtk-auto-mnemonics, it doesn’t render widgets correctly …
- Zeke says:
  
  July 17, 2010 at 19:24
  
  I think he was talking about the orange button which isn’t in the Linux version.
Anonymous says:

July 17, 2010 at 17:17

IMHO by the time FF 4 is released it will be already to late for FF to catch up, because many many users are switching to chrome because it feels so much faster (e.g. even when switching between tabs when you have many).
- dwa says:
  
  July 17, 2010 at 20:05
  
  I realise you didn’t say that the users of FF are switching to chrome on a massive scale, but if that’s what you meant, it seems like a statement based on a guess:
  
  http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-201028
  
  I have no problem with chrome converting IE users, but I rather have 3 competing browsers (at around a third each) than to just switch one dominating browser for another.
  - Anonymous says:
    
    July 17, 2010 at 23:53
    
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/16/browser_wars/
    - dwa says:
      
      July 18, 2010 at 05:08
      
      That seems to confirm that the flow to chrome comes mainly from IE and not really from FF.
      
      Even though it seems like FF aren’t currently gaining market share, FF still has more than twice the number of users compared to chrome. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens when FF4 comes out.