Firefox 4 is out

And although Firefox 4 isn’t officially released until tomorrow, copies have leaked out via FTP staging servers. I grabbed a copy from betanews to do my upgrade early.

I’ve played with pre-release versions, so no real surprises. It’s quick. The look changed quite a bit, but you can easily configure it to look like older versions if you want. I did on my desktop; on a netbook I might not.

If you’ve liked Firefox all along, you’ll like Firefox 4. If you’ve preferred IE or Chrome up to this point, I don’t think Firefox 4 changes enough to change your mind on that. It has a faster Javascript engine and makes better use of graphics hardware on Windows Vista or 7, but aside from that, it’s still the same basic browser. IE9 has all that too, and Chrome has fast Javascript and isn’t far behind with graphics acceleration of its own. Of course Firefox and Chrome have the advantage that they’ll still run under XP. I think Firefox 4 will even run under Windows 2000, if you’re still using that for some reason.

I like it, but I was using it when it was still a side project called Phoenix. Then it was Firebird. Then it became Firefox.

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