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FireFox 4 upgrade. Should I do it now or wait?
Anyone have experience converting to the new FireFox 4 browser? I remember how "interesting" thing were when FireFox 3 first came out.
Should I upgrade now? Are the bugs worked out? Should I wait for a few minor releases first?
Your opinions would help.
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Firefox 4 had release candidate period that lasted about two months. It's been hardened, but many extensions haven't had time to catch up.
I think it's better overall. It performs better, and a CPU-spiking issue I had with 3.6 appears to be eliminated. That's a huge plus.
If you run vista or windows 7, you might be put off by the new browser window layout, which takes pages from Microsoft Office 2007 and Google Chrome alike, but overall I adapted and I like it. I miss the status bar, but I can live without it.
There is one crash I run into rarely when I wake my computer from sleep. I don't know the cause.
Download a 3.6 installer, but I say proceed with 4. It's rad.
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I'm not upgrading until 3.6 support ends. New software is less secure and less stable than old software, so I want to wait until everything has had time to settle. I've also hated every single user interface change since Firefox 2.0, and I want to wait for extensions to come out that reverse whatever terrible things the Firefox UI team has cooked up this time.
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Should I upgrade to FireFox 4? I was just asking myself that very question. I use other browsers for most things, but I have a few FireFox ONLY plugins that I really need. The thing that was holding me up was not knowing for sure if they will keep working.
I spent a little time researching something I heard of in passing once, and sure enough, there is a way to at least TRY add-ons that aren't specifically certified to work with the current version.
Type "about:config" (without quotes) into your location bar. Create a new boolean value called: extensions.checkCompatibility and make sure you set it to false.
This may completely mess up your FF4 installation, or, as in my case, everything works exactly fine. There are add-ons that stopped working versions ago, which now work just fine again for me. How interesting is that?
I would like to thank the previous columnist for suggestion MOZBackup. I had forgotten about it completely, but am now using it again, thanks to them. I suggest it. Not just for upgrades, either.
Happy browsing!
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You may want to wait for a bit until the extension developers have had a chance to catch up. Or, go into it knowing that all your extensions may not work with the new version...
Beyond that, I would do a MOZBackup of your current installation and give it a shot. If you're not happy with the results, you can always restore the backup.
NOTE: MOZBackup also backs up Thunderbird. Maybe other Mozilla apps, but I only use Firefox and Thunderbird, so don't know for sure.
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I just downloaded it out of curiosity, and it really just seems like a Google Chrome clone, minus the smoothness, speed, and feeling of integration.
Google Chrome is a superior browser.
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