Early Adopters: User Experience Firefox 4

Editor's note: the official Firefox 4 version has been released yesterday. In the first three hours of the release, the download volume has exceeded millions. This article describes how Limi, a Firefox user experience designer, experiences Firefox 4. The following is the original text.

We are now in the final stage of official release of Firefox 4, firefox 4 is about to be officially released soon-probably next week-Now let's take a look at the important changes and improvements in user experience in this version.

Brand new appearance

You may already know that the appearance of Firefox 4 will be significantly changed on all supported platforms-Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/BSD. Improvements include:

● The tag is displayed on the top-if you maximize the Firefox Window on Windows, the tag bar is combined with the title bar of the window;

● Glass effect support for Windows 7 and Vista systems;

● Weaken the crowded layout and improve the effects of icons and rounded corners;

● The webpage has a larger display area;

● Supports full-window Personas;

●... You can choose not to use the complex search box in the upper right corner to make the toolbar more fresh, because you can directly enter the words you want to search in the address bar.

Changes in the appearance of Firefox 3.6 and 4 on Windows Platforms

Changes in the appearance of Firefox 3.6 and 4 on Mac OS X

More efficient menu

For Windows 7, Vista, and Linux systems, we provide a brand new Firefox button, one-click access menu, shortly after our original design was published, opera adopts this method first (now Google Chrome also integrates the two previous menu buttons into one)-they are released earlier than us, but it is fair-this is what we must face when doing Open Design. We think this is great because everyone is satisfied and we can get a better experience in all browsers.

Faster, faster, and faster

Previous articles have introduced many of Firefox 4's new JavaScript Engine, HTML5 engine, and high speed of making full use of hardware acceleration. Similarly, in Firefox 4, there are also many improvements that allow users to experience faster, especially when starting a browser:

● Startup speed: Firefox 4 is much faster than the 3 Series in terms of startup, and we are committed to making Firefox experience faster and more efficient at every stage;

● Brand new homepage: The homepage is not read through the network, which means that you can directly use Firefox's Homepage without waiting;

● Faster recovery to previous browsing sessions: During browsing, the status of the opened web page is changed to a browsing session. Firefox provides the function to restore the browsing session. When restoring, we will not read many tabs simultaneously, so that the browser responds faster, when you click a tab that is being read, we will automatically set a high priority for reading this tab;

● Update Extension: If you use a lot of extensions, you may hate waiting for them to upgrade when Firefox starts. Now, the update extension is completely in the background and will not interrupt your operations.

New Features

Similarly, there are a lot of new features in Firefox 4. Here are some of our favorite features:

● Network synchronization: It is important to have the same experience on all your computers and mobile phones. Nowadays, desktop computers, laptops, and smartphones are becoming more and more popular. You want them to access your browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, and open tabs at the same time. Unlike other services, before sending data over the network, we encrypt all your data to ensure super security for Firefox. It is even easier to add support for new devices. Firefox 4 is now available in the Android Market. If you are using an iPhone, you can use the Firefox Home application to obtain the content.

● Application tag: If you frequently use network applications such as email, Weibo, Renren, and Kaixin, you may open these applications every day, and you will fall in love with our application labels. Right-click any tag, and you can place it on the left of the tag bar, which only occupies a very small part. At the same time, if the content of the application changes, he will automatically notify you;

● Tag group: If you have opened more than n tags at the same time, you may be visiting websites within several content ranges at the same time, you can use this new feature of Firefox 4-tag group-also called Tag panorama-to organize the web page tags opened into different groups, this allows you to focus more on a certain type of web page content and applications.

● Expansion without restart: Do you still need to restart after installing the extension? Firefox 4 provides support for extensions that do not need to be restarted. You do not need to restart the browser after the extensions are upgraded;

● Extension Manager: In Firefox 4, we provide a new extension manager, which makes it easier to manage Firefox extensions and to search for and install new extensions.

More optimized operations

Some of the improvements I personally like very much are relatively small-there are many such small improvements-they add up to bring you more optimized operations and experience:

● Fewer dialogs and fewer problems: one of our goals is to balance the problem that we need to interrupt you. If not necessary, Firefox will try to avoid interrupting your operations as little as possible;

● It is easier to reduce notification interruptions: these notifications usually tell your website to access geographical information and whether to save the password. You can click anywhere outside the notification area to close them, you can also easily call out this notification through the address bar button;

● If the webpage you want to search for has been opened, you can easily enter certain words in the address bar, and then switch over easily.

● The mode dialog box no longer blocks access to other tabs:

● The bookmarks and extended columns only appear when you need them. They are easy to enable and disable.

● Firefox will not automatically go offline unless you need to go offline manually

●... There are many more. But I will not introduce it here, so I will leave it for you to discover it!

Now we have started the design of Firefox 5, 6, and 7, and you will soon be able to see the changes in the new version of Firefox. Download Firefox 4 RC!