Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Experience with New Firefox 4.0 final release

Posted by Rajeev on 3/23/2011 08:08:00 AM Firefox 4.0 , Mozilla 4 comments

I had just downloaded and used new Mozilla firefox 4.0 final version. I just want to share my view regarding the experience I had with this new version of firefox. First of all it is better and faster than those beta versions. Though it had most of the features which it had in earlier version, so I will talk about the changes done in this new version.

The Default Home Page of new Firefox 4.0 looks like

New menu button is added called firefox which have many options to access directly. See the pictures below

You can use the button or bring the old type menu bar which in this version look tiny.Just tick on menu bar by right clicking on upper panel. This will not show firefox button so you can use either menu bar or firefox button.

Pressing alt button shows the App tabs and menu bar along with firefox button but the menu bar disappear as you click on other place rather on option of menu bar.

The App tabs are shown in left is for displaying the website you used frequently. These App tabs never closes and they open each time when firefox open without any problem.

Making any tab as App tab is easy just right click on the tab whom yoy want to make as App Tab and click on Pin as App tab

Same can be deleted by right clicking on App tab(which you want to delete) and then clicking on Unpin Tab

The Tab now is at the top of the address bar or awesome bar. To put it down Just we need to uncheck the Tabs on the Top option. It can be done by either right clicking or got to firefox button option and uncheck Tabs on the Top.

This will change as

The new Bookmark button is very helpful where you can see all your bookmark easily. No need of the bookmark tool bar, this shows all your bookmark at one place as drop down menu. Have look

One of better feature of firefox is Panel based notifications which I like most. It very cool and interesting.This not helps you storing password but allows getting or sending queries over server eg. Sign in process. The browser alerts you time to time by these notifications. I picked out two examples for this feature.

First about the password see the notification for saving password

Also there is option for the password storing which can we seen by clicking the drop down menu box. This looks as below

Second Example for the panel notification is Location based browsing

Next see the options that drop down menu created for this notification. You can choose as per your need and desire.

The last feature I am talking is the Grouping of the tabs called as panorama.There is a button which shows you list of all open tabs in firefox which have a tab group button in right .

How to group the tab? Answere is simple just Click on the button on right shown below or press Ctrl+Shift+E command to open the grouped tab. First if you opened it you will see the all tabs in a single group

In above picture we see that there is only one tab and all webpage are in it. So let customrize our own group. Double click on the empty space (the space that the group already having has not covered) a new tab will open. Then again click on Tab Groups and see you have two groups. One the first which contained all pages you had opened and second one have the new empty tab.

Just drag one or more webpages in a place and make a group with your own. It quite simple and easy to do. We can make as many groups as we wantsSee below an example of how I grouped the tabs

Firefox automatically set the size of a group according to no pages in it. But you can make change to the size of any of the group.

Let us name the group which make easy to understand the contents of the group. Click on the upper left corner and the group of your choice. See put relevant name ti identify that group and its websites. The group having single member can’t be name. You can chage the name of a group any time.

There is a very good feature in grouping tabs and that is search feature. You can search any page from the search box provided. The website will be highlighted to you. As below I searches for yahoo which got highlighted and rest in dark shade.

Last point is about the accidental closed group . If you had closed a group then it will show an option for you of undoing the action thus save you from loosing you webpage.

This feature adopted from chrome is also applicable to the pages. You have to do simple job just click on the the firefox button and click history and then choose from recently closed tabs/window.