Just installed it, and after the fiasco of an earlier release candidate (which lasted about an hour on my machine), I can say I actually like it. It's noticably faster (well, more responsive that is) than 3.6, the UI is prettier (somebody has taken some long hard looks at Opera I'd say), they cut out much of the crap found in earlier RCs, and so far it has yet to cause any problem at all. Only annoyance so far is that Firebug doesn't seem to be available yet, but other than that, I'm all 'yay'.

I've also sampled IE9 today, and while I find it butt-ugly, it seems that finally I have to man up and do my job instead of blaming IE for being lame. It's still behind the rest of the bunch in many regards, but at least they're now playing in the same league again.

In other news, browser-land is interesting again, in a good way.

Ouch

IE is single processed? o0

you can get firebug from their website.

Well, I'd rank IE slightly below Opera, but they're both pretty bad. What I'm talking about is the tab headers - they look a lot like those in Opera, and while Opera is general usability disaster (unless you happen to be one of those people who somehow like it, in which case it' apparently better than sliced bread), at least the graphics design is visually pleasing. I can never guess what things do, but they're pretty. IE however is both unusable AND ugly.
Firefox used to be ugly and slow, but very usable otherwise, and it still has the best collection of extensions.

Oh dear... even 3.0 is beyond end-of-lifecycle...

Why does everyone obsess so much about memory usage? I generally have enough RAM on my machine to spare a few hundred MiB on the web browser, and as long as nothing causes swapping, I'm perfectly OK with a web browser that allocates more memory than it would strictly need. After all, using more memory is often the result of trading - you lose some memory, you win some CPU time, network bandwidth, I/O, etc. 9 GiB would definitely be too much, but I've never seen that.

Gee, you're right. The 'installer' is a bit ghetto, but I'm fine with that.

It's not that slow anymore. Still behind the rest in various benchmarks, but not in a way that you'd notice during normal use. I have no idea how Firefox uses threads and processes; 3.6 occasionally locked up on me, to the point that I had to go killall -9 firefox and then manually remove the lockfile, but I haven't had any such issues with 4.0 yet.

Also, I wonder how one would benchmark IE on linux

Really? So you don't care at all if some software is using 2GB or more for no reason what so ever? I do. Its stupid. Its lazy ass coding and not giving a fuck. If they can't bother with managing memory use, how many other things do they not care about?

I often see firefox and chrome eat up multiple GB of ram. At least though with chrome I don't have to restart the entire browser to free up some ram. Though sometimes I do need to restart chrome to get it to stop hanging every other tab.

I like FF3. After looking at screenshots of FF4 I am hesitant to switch to it. I don't like Chrome at all, don't like the interface and I hate navigating menus, I like my toolbar with all my links on it. I also like my home button, reload buttons etc.. on the upper left side, not the right...

I never have some of the problems people have mentioned in here, like lockups or what not. I would like to see it use less memory but otherwise I am happy with FF3 as is.

If there is some sort of add on where I can make the FF4 UI look the same as FF3 with my toolbar for links etc... than I will give it a shot. But even then... FF3 works for me, I have no problems with it, so why change?

Slow?! I have known Firefox for a lot of things, but never slow. One of the reasons I switched to it so many years ago was because it was so fast. And still is.

Enable the menu in the latest FF4 beta, drag the icons from the right to the left like I have and it's no different to FF3, only faster.

{"name":"603750","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/6\/56ad77c9a2a20ead024804e2acde7c46.jpg","w":1058,"h":731,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/6\/56ad77c9a2a20ead024804e2acde7c46"}

So I'm not seeing the tab bar above the address bar in that screenshot?

Oddly enough, for me anyway, having the tab at the top is better for me as I tend to click a bookmark by mistake when it's below.

I like the tabs on top feature because it leaves more space for websites.

Ooooh, thanks for that, I'll definitely install it then. Had me worried that FF4 was going to be another Chrome clone... that's very nice indeed.

I may leave the tabs on top, we'll see, that doesn't bother me so much.

shakes cane furiously at Matthew.. damn kids.

Just installed it and reconfigured it... looks nice, I do like tabs on top but... what do I do with all this space?!