Seems like Mozilla is feeling the heat from its competitors, especially the rapidly growing Google Chrome. As a result, we get to have an early (albeit long-awaited) preview of Firefox 4. Almost two weeks out, I still stick to Google Chrome.
Mostly, it's because the new UI seems to mess up with my copy of Windows 7 x64, terribly. There is no Aero interface, the buttons become very weird when I hide the bookmarks toolbar, and the close, minimize, and maximize buttons were all missing. Well, understandably its a beta release, so Mozilla should be squashing out these bugs for the next release.
Just look how ugly it is.
If you tried it, you might notice there is a Feedback add-on installed with Firefox 4 beta. I think its a good addition, it will be easier for users to provide feedback. However, for now, slightly more than half of feedbacks are Sad (Feedbacks are divided into Happy or Sad). Hopefully Mozilla will take notice of this and build a better browser in the future :D
Oh, and you can view the current feedbacks here: https://input.mozilla.com/
Earlier I mentioned my UI messed up badly. So just being curious, I downloaded the nightly build of Firefox, codenamed Minefield. Minefield is currently version 4 Pre Beta 2. It appears to run fine on my PC, showing the correct UI. And surprisingly, it even fixed my Firefox 4 Beta 1! So yeah, maybe I'll go back and try Firefox 4 again, properly.
Now that looks right.
UPDATE: I finally know the cause of the UI mess; Strata40 theme. While both Firefox 3.6.6 and Firefox 4 Beta 1 (and Minefield 4 Pre Beta 2) are independent installations, they share the same settings. Strata40 is designed for Firefox 3.5+ to mimic the look of Firefox 4 (based on early mockups) and should be used with StrataBuddy. The similarities between Strata40 and the default theme for Firefox 4 caused the confusion. Currently Strata40 is not compatible with Firefox 4. The only way to fix it is to use the default theme, both in Firefox 3.5+ and Firefox 4.
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