Will Firefox 4 tempt power users back?
Like a lot of people, after the extensions I used in Firefox became available for Google Chrome, Mozilla’s browser fell by the wayside — too slow, too bloated and the zeitgeist had definitely moved on. Now, with a faster rewrite sporting new features nearing completion, perhaps including hardware accelerated page rendering, it’s time to take a fresh look at Firefox.
Yes, Firefox 4 is notably faster than previous versions and the world’s favorite open-source browser even offers pretty decent HTML5 support, too. However, the still to be implemented feature that grabbed my attention is OpenGL hardware accelerated webpage rendering.
“It can help with various mathematically intense operations, such as converting video from its encoded color description to the red-green-blue values needed to display on screen. It can also speed image, video, text, and vector graphics resizing” — News.com
That said, benchmarks of current nightlies show hardware acceleration actually slows down load times. Further, it’s worth noting that Mozilla still hasn’t decided whether OpenGL acceleration will make it into beta 7, which is expected to be the final beta, let alone the final shipping version of Firefox 4.
Better enough?
Though I’m pretty happy with Safari and Chrome, and don’t have a need for a third browser on my Mac, it would be a benefit to all if Firefox 4 could pull even with Webkit-based browsers (i.e. competition is a good thing)…
Competitive enough to tempt you back?
I use Firefox 4 betas for some websites, but it remains my 2nd/3rd browser with Chrome being my primary browser.
I however do not use any plugins other than a flash blocker.
At least with the current Firefox 4 beta (as well as previous ones, and 3.6) it still does not recover enough ram from closed tabs/windows like Chrome does. And it is this aspect that keeps Chrome as my primary browser over Safari or Firefox.
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