Honestly, I haven’t been paying too much attention to the Firefox Team‘s developments over the last few months and so, upgrading to Firefox 4 was a bit out of the blue.

But, the guru Don in the office upgraded and recommended it and well, here we are.

You know what, I like it too.

A quick play around with it didn’t reveal too much, but after a day of using it I’ve put together a few of the notable updates and what I think of them:

• Tab groups – This is quite a nifty little feature if you’re a “power user” (which I’m not). If you’re the kind of browser who sits with a pile of tabs open everyday (like the maestro Don) then this is for you. If, like me, you’ve only got 6 or 7 open then perhaps it isn’t. The tab grouping feature allows you to group tabs into sub sections within one window, meaning that organisation of your open tabs becomes a bit easier. Think of it as folders for your tabbed browsing. It’s a neat idea to be honest and if you are a big tab user it’ll be great for you, but for me it’s one more click to get to where I want to be. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future.
• Redesigned interface / alert boxes – This I like a lot. The whole interface has been redesigned with tabs now sitting at the top of the browser beneath the title bar; the address bar neatly tucked underneath that. Let me say that it took a while to get used to, but after a half hour it was all fine and second nature again – and if you really hate it, you can simply put the tabs back on the bottom again by right clicking beneath the title bar and deselecting “Tabs on Top”. Team Firefox have also done a great job of reworking the alert boxes and “remember password” popouts to make them a little more pleasant and less instrusive. It’s a nice refinement and something that you’ll not notice after a few hours working with version 4.
• Speed – Honestly I didn’t notice any difference here. Ouch, sorry guys. Still, FF4 is nippy as hell and certainly performs fast enough for my requirements. I’m sure properly testing against a set of predefined benchmarks reveals the “under the hood” improvements but I just don’t get that Jedi with my browsing.
• Pin As App Tab – This is where Firefox 4 works really well for me. I use Firefox as my daily hub, with all of the apps that help us to run our business situated in the cloud. Previously I’d have to crack each of these 3 or 4 large and screen space hogging tabs open every time I started work and login to each. Now, I can simply right click on an open tab and select “Pin as App Tab” to make the tab shrink itself into a nice corner and become a “web app” that opens itself everytime I pop Firefox open. This is a fantastic addition and something that really lends itself to cloud working, a trend that of course is becoming more and more popular as net speeds increase and web apps continue to rival desktop apps at the enterprise level. Once you start to use this in tandem with Firefox Sync, you can start to realise that “one” setup experience that a lot of freelancers / business owners strive for – it certainly helps me with my iMac / MacBook Pro working situation.

Overall, Firefox 4 is a big improvement over the last iteration and for me, is still the best browser bar none for general and heavy duty web use.

Whilst I don’t use, nor have I spoken about all of the new features here; Firefox 4 is well worth a look for first time Firefox users and a welcome upgrade for foxy veterans.

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