Mozilla Firefox 4 Review

Firefox 4 has been long time coming. Although the first beta landed in our midst back in June last year, the first alpha actually came out in February, so you can tell Mozilla has been working on this for quite some time now. Firefox 4 is actually quite a bit of an improvement over its predecessor and brings a host of new features that should help it compete against the likes of Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and the new Internet Explorer 9. So we took it for a little spin to see how big an improvement it really is.

UI & Features
The most noticeable change is the new interface. Firefox 4 eschews the traditional Windows menu bar for a Chrome-like transparent top bar. The important menu items are now congregated in an Opera 11 style single button in the top left corner. As you can see, none of the UI elements are particularly original. Mozilla has chosen to borrow all the good things about the UI from its competitors and we think it has worked to their advantage. The new design looks simple and minimalistic and also uses less portion of your display. Firefox 4 does take about two pixels more than Opera 11 and Chrome and several more compared to IE9 with the tabs beside the address bar.

The drop down menu in the top left is a heavily simplified version of the traditional menu found on Firefox 3. Those used to the older browser will feel bit lost here as everything is now placed as a sub-menu that you have to wait for to appear when you hover over a menu item. You can of course choose to bring the menu bar back but then it will consume more screen space and doesn't look remotely good on the transparent bar. The button normally looks orange but turns purple in Private Browsing mode.


Mac and Linux users for now don't have access to this new menu button. They instead rely on the fixed menu bar on top of their screens to access all the functions. Also, since there is no transparency effect, the Mac and Linux versions look almost identical to Firefox 3, except for some redesigned buttons that are placed differently.

The buttons have been rearranged in Firefox 4. There isn't a separate Stop and Refresh button anymore. Both the functions have now been combined to merge them into a single button placed inside the address bar and changed function depending on the browser activity. This has made the address bar and the search bar pretty long, although we would have liked if Mozilla had merged them into one, just like on Chrome and IE9. Thankfully, the address bar now finally has the Paste & Go and Paste & Search functions that Opera has had for ages and so does Chrome (Chrome is even smart enough to know whether the content in clipboard is simple text or a URL and changes the options accordingly). The Home button is on the extreme right, along with a new Bookmarks button that compensates for the lack of a dedicated menu bar item.

The tabs are now above the address bar. You can move them around but it seems Mozilla has failed to notice that other browsers now have tabs that move smoothly around, a feature first seen on Safari. You can pluck them out into a separate window and then put them back in. A new feature with tabs on Firefox 4 is the ability to pin them, something that Chrome first had. Mozilla calls it Application Tabs. Tabs that have been pinned stay in the tab bar even after you close the browser and reload when you start it again. They take on a smaller form and only show their favicon to identify themselves.

The tab bar has a New Tab button that is placed on the far right. What's more, you can't even double click on the tab bar to create a new bar as it is now part of the window frame and double clicking it maximizes or minimizes the window. Thankfully, you can drag the button next to a tab and it turns into an old fashioned New Tab button next to the last tab.

Firefox 4 comes with a new tab management feature called Firefox Panorama. When you summon it by pressing Ctrl + Shift + E, it shows you all your open tabs. You see thumbnails for all your tabs, which makes it very to jump to one, especially if you have dozens of open tabs. You can drag a tab out of a group and then add or drag other tabs into it to create a new group. You can also right click a tab and then send it directly to a new group. You can rename the groups as well. You can have different groups, one for, say, your work related windows or one for something else, say, your social networking sites. Of course, this is something worth investing time in only if you spend considerable amount of time inside a web browser and don't ever close it at all. When you click on a tab in a group, you will only see the tabs from that group in the tab bar.

Panorama is a nice thing to have on board. Even if you don't use its ability to separate your tabs into different group, you will still appreciate its ability to give you thumbnail previews of your open tabs, which makes switching much easier.