Suspected PayPal Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison
2 Men Arrested After Teen Was Run Over For His iPad
Firefox 4 Friday: 25 million downloads, anti-aliasing, and how to make it look like Firefox 3
Yes, 13 months after the initial release of Firefox 3.7 alpha 1 and four more alpha builds, a renumbering to 4.0 and 12 beta releases, and finally a release candidate (or two), Firefox 4 has been released into the wild.
Just like every other Firefox release, initial reception for the new browser has been nothing short of insane. 7.1 million downloads were registered in the first 24 hours and the download rate continued to accelerate, clocking in more than 15 million downloads after two days. At the time of writing, three days in, Firefox 4 has been downloaded over 25 million times. In case you're wondering, the United States accounts for 7 million of those downloads, just beating out Germany's Firefox-downloads-per-capita.
But now that you've installed Firefox 4 (you have, right?), what do you do now? Well, obviously, in true Download Squad fashion, it's time to tweak Firefox 4 using add-ons and about:config hacks!
First up is an add-on called Stratiform that lets you change every aspect of the Firefox 4 browser chrome -- including the color of that orange button!
Stratiform
First and foremost, it lets you change the color, brightness, and opacity of the Firefox (or 'app menu') button. You can change the label, too. If you want to completely remove it, you'll need to use Movable Firefox Button.
Beyond the orange button, Stratiform lets you play with your tab style, width, height and color -- and it allows you to change the style of buttons (back, forward, refresh) and textboxes (address and search bars).
All of the changes occur in real time, too, which makes playing with Stratiform rather fun. I now have a pink Firefox button and green tabs...
Fine-tune Firefox 4's anti-aliasing
With Firefox 4 for Windows, Direct2D is utilized to provide hardware acceleration and improved, smoothed font rendering.While in most cases the result is clear and smooth text, there are some cases where you might want to make small, barely-perceptible changes -- and that's where Anti-Aliasing Tuner comes in.
Anti-Aliasing Tuner lets alter the anti-aliasing mode (default, ClearType, Greyscale), rendering mode (default, Aliased, GDI Classic/Natural, Natural/Natural Symmetric, Outline), and various levels and thresholds for when to turn smoothing on, and by how much.
Unfortunately you can't see your changes in real time, so it can be quite hard to see the changes you make!
[thanks to commenter Yansky for pointing out this add-on!]
Miss the RSS icon in Firefox 4's address bar?
In the search for a svelte, spartan, Chromesque UI, Firefox's address bar RSS icon got axed. To be fair, there's probably a rational reason for this: most feed readers can auto-detect RSS feeds when you give them a website URL.If you want the icon back, however, simply install RSS Icon. If a page only has one RSS feed, clicking it opens your default feed handler; if multiple feeds are detected, it pops open a menu of the feeds on the page.
Make Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3
Whenever any popular thing gets overhauled (New Coke!) there are always a (cult-like) following who would rather keep things just the way they were -- and Firefox 4 is no exception.
Maybe you like the status bar. Maybe you want your valuable vertical pixels to be ruthlessly stolen by the menu bar. There are probably even a few weird individuals that would like their tabs to be back beneath the address bar -- back where they belong!
Maybe you like the status bar. Maybe you want your valuable vertical pixels to be ruthlessly stolen by the menu bar. There are probably even a few weird individuals that would like their tabs to be back beneath the address bar -- back where they belong!
To make Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3, just follow these simple steps:
- To restore the menu bar, right click any empty area at the top of the browser and then select Menu Bar
- To restore the status bar, grab the fantastically-named Status-4-Evar add-on
- To put tabs under the address bar, right click any empty area at the top of the browser and then deselect Tabs on Top
Comments
28
Subscribe to commentsChrisSskMar 25th 2011 12:47PM
anther tip for anyone who wants separate stop and refresh buttons like in FF3.x, select customize and put the stop ahead of reload button
Sebastian AnthonyMar 25th 2011 12:53PM
@ChrisSsk Ah-hah! Good call :)
jakethatMar 25th 2011 4:11PM
@Sebastian Anthony
Thanks for the Stratiform tip. New must have addon for ff4- Barlesque. Makes the addon bar more useful.
RirathMar 25th 2011 1:19PM
Thanks for pointing out Stratiform, looks useful.
Did I miss something though? I thought the orange button was (thankfully) moved inline with the other tabs? I used a custom chrome setup in the early betas, then removed it when it finally went inline, and my FF bar is still inline.
Now, in all the official screens, it looks like it's back on it's own row again. What did I miss?
Sebastian AnthonyMar 25th 2011 1:19PM
@Rirath If you maximize the window it slips in line with the tabs -- otherwise it gets its own row :)
HitmakerMar 25th 2011 1:17PM
I was just wondering how to get the RSS Icon back too. Convenient! Next step, to resurrect the Go button....
Sebastian AnthonyMar 25th 2011 1:19PM
@Hitmaker Just find an old version of Netscape and download that...
RirathMar 25th 2011 1:34PM
@Sebastian Anthony - Hah, yeah. I just realized and hoped I could get back here before you caught it. Nope!
HitmakerMar 26th 2011 3:07PM
@Sebastian Anthony as tempting as that is (nostagia and all that), the "Show Go!" extension has taken care of that for me. I love firefox
MxxConMar 25th 2011 1:34PM
Regarding Anti-Aliasing addon "Unfortunately you can't see your changes in real time, so it can be quite hard to see the changes you make!"
Actually if you drag the whole addons tab into a separate window, you can then have 2 windows open side by side: one with the addons(and this extension's options dialog) and another window with a page full of text you want to experiment with. Then you simply click on the other window every time you make a change.
Unfortunatelly, I tried every single combination of settings in that addon and fonts still don't look right/different from every other browser. In the end i still ended up disabling gfx.direct2d.disabled variable and now fonts look proper.
MxxConMar 25th 2011 1:35PM
I mean "ended up *ENABLING* gfx.direct2d.disabled variable and now fonts look proper."
Sebastian AnthonyMar 25th 2011 2:00PM
@MxxCon Hah, nice one. Yeah, I looked for a some shortcut to open the options dialog, but I could only do it through the add-ons tab -- and of course, I didn't think to pull the add-ons tab out :)
I hear the font issues are pretty bad for some people. They've always been OK for me.
RyzvonusefMar 25th 2011 1:56PM
Doesn't the Add-on bar (Ctrl+/) work the same as the old status bar?
Sebastian AnthonyMar 25th 2011 1:59PM
@Ryzvonusef Nup, it's just for add-ons.
Dan LarsonMar 25th 2011 2:16PM
The RSS button has been moved out of the Awesomebar and out to its own button - when you're customizing the toolbars, it's labeled "Subscribe" in the button list. I suppose this is handy for the sake of customization, but I would have thought they would do something in the same vein as the Reload/Stop button. Ordering the controls Location box > Reload > Stop combines the Reload and Stop buttons into a hybrid Go/Reload/Stop button attached to the end of the box, so I would think Location box > Subscribe > Reload > Stop would condense down and put the Subscribe button back to the Awesomebar as well.
Or, you know, you can just use the extension to put it back in the Awesomebar where it belongs. I went with "RSS Icon In Awesombar [sic]" as opposed to "RSS Icon" - I prefer the look of the full orange square over the orange outlined version - but it does the same thing.
saveforarainydayMar 25th 2011 2:20PM
Why do you have the stop and the refresh button separated? They stack when they're next to each other. The FF4 is intended to have both buttons between the Awesomebar and the Search bar. When you do so the stop/refresh becomes a part of the Awesomebar saving more space. Pro tip: while you're customizing the toolbar, you can check a box at the bottom of the dialog that shrinks the giant back button for a slimmer bar. You can even put the home button in the tab bar if that makes more sense to you.
And everyone crying about tabs on top can get over it. It's more logical. Period. They didn't pour hours into designing and come to that conclusion without a reason. Perhaps these people need to watch the feature video again: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/?video=fx4-ui.
MxxConMar 25th 2011 5:18PM
@saveforarainyday you call "Use Small Icons" checkbox a "pro tip"? *roll eyes*
contact.tonyMar 25th 2011 6:19PM
@saveforarainyday
Firefox4 has the tabs on top because they copied Google Chrome. Opera had tabs on top for years before Chrome and FF did it but it wasn't until Chrome came out that FF decided to do it. So it wasn't some big vision by FF, they simply stopped leading and are now following Chrome.
The result is a bloated resource hog just like Chrome and they will be starting a significantly more frequent release cycle so they can play games with the version numbers like Chrome. I don't like where Firefox is heading. Chrome is a moron browser and Firefox should not be changing to follow it.
tweakerMar 25th 2011 11:34PM
@saveforarainyday
No, you get over it. Who made tabs on top "more logical"? Because Google said so? I click on tabs more than any other thing and I want them close. I will not bow to your new master overlord.
SilverWaveMar 26th 2011 7:53AM
@saveforarainyday
Bolocks