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.
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 …
I think he was talking about the orange button which isn’t in the Linux version.
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).
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.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/16/browser_wars/
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.