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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Mozilla Firefox - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Downloads

I've been using Firefox 4 in my Fusion 14 (Fedora Remix) for a couple of months now, in my other Computer. And after Tweaking the look and feel back to about what I'm use to in my Firefox for the last 5 plus years... I'm liking 4 allot. I still have Firefox 3.6.17 in my Fedora 14 System. Which is what I'm writing this Post on... And I wanted to update to Firefox 4, so that I could Sync my Bookmarks automatically. And so that I would stop getting confused about where things are in the Right Click Menus, when I change from one machine to the other. I went to the Firefox site. But all the have available is Firefox 5. I read a negative review or comment on Firefox 5 a week or so ago. So I was not ready to try it blindly. After searching around a while and not finding a Download for Firefox 4, for Fedora Linux. I decided to read up on Firefox 5. And from what I see, it looks like it is allot like Firefox 4. So, I believe I will go ahead and give it a try. Here's what I found so far. I'll write more on Firefox 5, after I get mine updated to 5...

Don

Mozilla Firefox - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Downloads

Mozilla Firefox - Download.com

CNET editors' rating: 5.0 stars
Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 14138 votes
See all user reviews
CNET Editors' ChoiceMar 11

Quick specs
Version: 5.0
Date added: June 21, 2011
Price: Free
Operating system: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7
Total Downloads: 29,795,447
Downloads last week: 139,716
Product Ranking: #1 in Web Browsers
See full specifications
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CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Seth Rosenblatt on June 20, 2011

The bottom line: Firefox 5 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of Firefox's competition, too.

Review:
Firefox 5 is the first version of Firefox released under Mozilla's rapid-release cycle, which means that instead of seeing a new whole-number version once every year or two, you'll now see one every three months. This follows in the footsteps of Google Chrome, which adopted the rapid-release cycle a while ago and is now up to version 12 (at the time this review was written) despite having its first release only in 2008.

Firefox 4 had a massive impact on Firefox 5, and so this review is not dramatically different from its predecessor. Firefox 4 had a rough time in its early development, but those days are over. The browser that you can download now is in the same speed category as its competition; offers many similar features (stronger in many areas and slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support for hardware acceleration and other "future-Web" tech and standards; and is a must-have for Android users (download for Android).

In Firefox 5, you get more incremental updates that generally focus on making the browser work better. One of the most important improvements is that the browser now supports Mozilla's new Add-on SDK, formerly called Jetpack. This foundation lets programmers build extensions out of Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than the older XUL technology. Extensions are expected to be easier to write and ought not to break when new browser versions arrive, although add-on developers must still decide whether to rewrite their existing extensions. The browser supports Mozilla's new Add-on Builder, too, which ought to make it easier to create add-ons.

Also under the hood, CSS animations now work in Firefox 5, which means that the browser can handle more dynamic Web content that moves around a page more easily.

Not much of the interface has changed from Firefox 4, although the Do Not Track box has been moved to a more prominent place in the Options menu, under Privacy. It's also now available in Firefox for Android.

It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox available at the moment, and this review only addresses the "stable" branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels are Firefox beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for Windows | Mac | Linux); and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly Firefox Minefield (download for all versions) are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 5, as is these Firefox 4 How To collection, even though they feature Firefox 4.

Read More...
http://download.cnet.com/mozilla-firefox/