At the moment, having given my ThinkPad back to IBM (and being without Windows until next week), I’m a 100% Mac user. But I’m not using Firefox. Shortly after installing Firefox 4 on the iMac I started to receive complaints from another member of the iMac’s user base (known to you, dear readers, as the current Mrs Adams). And actually I was suffering the same problem. For all of it’s life the iMac has performed well, but now, for some strange reason, it was entering into long periods of ‘thinking about what it was doing’. Or in layman’s terms, not responding for minutes on end. This started around the same time Firefox 4 was installed, and the problems occurred when Firefox 4 was running (Mrs A tends to leave it loaded in her logged-on account, as do I). The problems stopped around the same time that Firefox 4 was downgraded to 3.6.something. No need for the jury to retire, m’lud.

However, that wasn’t the end of the Firefox issues. Shortly after downgrading Firefox, it upgraded itself (just a bit) to 3.6.17… and then the spinning beach-ball (a sight well-known to, but not welcomed by, Mac users) started to appear with annoying frequency. The browser would often be in a death spiral of unresponsiveness for up to two minutes – but at least this version had the good grace not to tie up the entire OS. I stripped out the plug-ins but to no avail.

At this point I decided to give Google’s Chrome a go. I did say back in 2008 that there was nothing to make me switch, but back then it was in beta. Now it’s up to version 12 (what, already?). Since installing Chrome I’ve never looked back. It’s fast, it never shows the beach-ball, and I’ve realised I can live without the Firefox plug-ins (apart from one that mimics Firefox’s live bookmark feature).

Anyway, back to Firefox. Version 5? It took thirty-three months for Mozilla to take Firefox from version 3 to 4. There were fourteen months between versions 3.6 and 4. But the gap between version 4 and 5 was just three months (a day less actually). So I’m not going to bother with version 5, I’ll just wait for version 6 in September. Think I’m joking? Wikipedia states that Mozilla hope to ship versions 6 and 7 in 2011. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes:

The Mozilla Foundation, following in the footsteps of Google’s Chrome web browser, seems to believe that if they keep popping out new “major” releases every six weeks, they’ll convince people they’re better than the competition.

Well, that would seem to be the way that Chrome got to version 12 in less than three years, so maybe he’s right. Mr Vaughan-Nichols states that this is a mere point release (a minor one at that), rather than a major release.

Personally, I’ll be selecting my browser based on speed and reliability rather than who has the highest version number.

An upgrade is very likely to expose some non-supported plug-ins, and it’s likely to give Mrs A a case of the wobbles – as Firefox is installed on the family iMac, an upgrade for me is an upgrade for everyone.

But ignoring these minor disasters, here’s a quick run-down of some of the more prominent new features:

• Tab groups – I usually have loads of tabs open, often because I want to read something later or have something open that prompts me to do something on my to-do list. I have a number of things I always need to have open (Facebook, Twitter, Connections Profiles), but the other stuff doesn’t always need to be visible. So the ability to group tabs together, hide a set but have the ability to return to the tabs is extremely useful.
• App tabs – having established that there’s pages I always want access to, wouldn’t it be great if they could be pinned onto the tab bar with no close button? Yes… and that’s what app tabs are for. Nice.
• More screen real-estate – the new layout of Firefox 4 provides a bit more vertical space… not a lot, but any reclaimed real-estate is a good thing.
• Tabs on top – as the name of the feature suggests, the tabs are moved to the top. This provides even more reclaimed real-estate… but it may take a bit of getting used to.
• Switching to tabs from the ‘awesome bar’ – if you type in the name of an open tab, Firefox shows that it’s a tab rather than an address in your history, and gives you an option to switch to it.

The following screenshot shows the new menu button (available on Windows and Linux, the Mac version retains the standard OS X menu), tabs on top, and three app tabs. Note that Twitter glows blue because the page has updated in the background.

Firefox 4 is rumoured to be faster than it’s predecessors – I haven’t witnessed any noticeable difference yet. All-in-all it’s a worthy upgrade, even without my beloved Camifox.

However, that’s a less than 1% rise for Firefox since October 2009, but a 5.8% decrease for Internet Explorer. So where has the market share gone? One would assume it’s gone to Google’s Chrome, but could it have jumped 5%?

From now on I’m just going to look in one place, and that’s here.  The figures tell us that since June 2009 Internet Explorer lost 8.37%, while Firefox gained 2.16%, Chrome gained 4.33% and Safari gained 0.93%.

What I find interesting is that both Microsoft and Google have thrown money at advertising their browsers, both free products. A few months ago there were some big Chrome posters in key positions in London – for Google it has to be about mind-share. At the moment, Microsoft are running adverts for Internet Explorer on television – is this to try to stem the market share leak? One of the adverts shows a generous man shopping on-line for gifts for his missus, and extols the benefits of private browsing. That’s something that Internet Explorer’s three big rivals can do too, so if they were trying to differentiate themselves Microsoft wasted a big pile of money on that one.

As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. Note that the title specifically states Firefox 3.5, and it’s compared against Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8. Firefox (according to the StatCounter survey) has 21.93% of the market, followed by Internet Explorer 7 with 21.2% and then Internet Explorer 8 with 20.33%. So, with Internet Explorer 6 holding 14.12%, the total Internet Explorer share is 55.65%. This compares to 32.42% for all versions of Firefox.

However, this does show growth for Firefox and shrinkage for Internet Explorer since September, although the fact that the figures come from two different sources make that statistic a little unreliable.

Ten months later the two haven’t waved at each other as they passed in opposite vertical directions, but the gap has closed a bit. According to The Register, Firefox now claims 23.75% while Internet Explorer has lost more ground and sits at 65.71%. Those of you who boast impressive mental arithmetic will see that Internet Explorer’s fall is only 0.03% larger than Firefox’s gain. Where that missing 0.03% went is anyone’s guess, but I’d put my money on Apple’s Safari. Or maybe Google’s Chrome.

To add to Mozilla’s chest-beating, their CEO John Lilly claimed that Firefox gained over 30 million unique users in a recent eight weeks period. Since then (if you haven’t heard), Windows 7 has been released – so it’ll be interesting to see whether the glacial-like erosion of Internet Explorer’s share continues to take place.

First let’s look at the performance. According to the what’s new page, 3.5 is more than twice as fast as 3. I actually think that measuring browser speed is pretty tricky – if you’re visiting lots of sites the connection speed, the amount of content, the page design and logic all contribute to very different experiences. If you’re accessing a web server which is perilously under-specced, swamped with traffic and connected to the Internet with a length of garden twine, the performance will suck. However, it does feel as if 3.5 is zipping along so I’m not going to doubt the performance claim. They also claim “smaller memory footprint” – with twelve tabs open and a handful plug-ins installed, this hungry fox is weighing in at 235 mb in memory. So much for the thin client.

Next up is a rather fun feature known as ‘location-aware browsing’ which allows Firefox to tell applications where you are (subject to privacy and permissions). The demo application showed a blue circle hovering over Camberley, probably about half a mile in diameter, and Adams Towers sat just within it… so they got it right. I can see this being quite useful – imagine you want a pizza, the provider’s web site could show you the nearest outlet. Or a retailer could give you an instant answer for a delivery cost to your location.

Firefox 3.5 boasts an increased number of open standards, including the emerging Ogg Theora video standard – this will allow the browser to play embedded videos without the need for other plug-ins.

A neat new feature related to tabs – you can pick one up and drag outside of the browser to spawn the content in a new window.

Finally, the big new feature which is ‘private browsing’. This is described as the ability to browse but not leave any trace of what you’ve looked at. There isn’t any reference to it now, but there was a scenario put forward along the lines of “you could be shopping on-line for a gift and you don’t want a family member to see what you’ve been looking at”. Absolutely… I can’t think of any other scenario where you might want to cover up what you’ve been looking at on the Internet. Any ideas?

I’ve already blogged about Firefox 3 here so I don’t need to do it again. Let’s assume that if you’re already a Firefox user you’re going to want the new version. At the Spread Firefox web site you can pledge to download version 3 on Tuesday and then see how the pledges are totting up worldwide. At the moment there are 52,955 pledges from the UK, but we’re trailing France, Italy and Germany (come on people, nothing like a bit of healthy competition to spur on us Brits). Poland is way ahead in Europe with 89,313 pledges, but of course the US of A is the worldwide leader with 215,355.

Mozilla need 1.6 downloads to set the record, currently the total pledges stand at just under 1.3 million. So what are you waiting for? If you do pledge, remember to actually do the download.

Mozilla tells us that this new version provides more robust security, improved password management, better bookmark management, and improved reliability and performance. Personally I would highlight the following features:

• An address bar which not only fills in URL information but also finds words in web page titles that you’ve recently accessed – very useful if you can’t remember the URL but can remember the subject of the page
• Quick access to most-recently and most-frequently-used bookmarks
• Quick bookmarking and tagging – just click the star in the address bar

A couple of niggles though – the first will be sorted out in time… very few of my favourite plug-ins work at the moment, but I’d expect them all to support Firefox 3 very shortly. My favourite RSS reader NewsFox works so it’s no big deal.

The second is the new download manager. While it boasts some nice new features such as resumable downloads, the user interface is horrible – it looks like shareware and is a step backwards. However, this is a small gripe, and whether you go for RC1 or wait until the final 3.0 release I’d definately recommend Firefox 3 (especially if Internet Explorer is still your browser of choice).