Unless you’ve been living under a giant rock for the past – well – few years, you should know that Firefox 4.0 is coming. A major new version of Mozilla’s browser with redesigned interface, new addon manager, new engine, lots of improvements and tweaks. Mozilla die-hard fans look at it as the ultimate program coming to a computer near them. We Mac users just think about how Mozilla badly screwed up with the UI on OS X in the past and wait with curious eyes for some stable version to actually ship.
Now, we have a nightly version (as usual, it’s dubbed Minefield) with the much-discussed tabs-on-top available for testing. You can also download a 64-bit enabled build for Snow Leopard.
So, how about these tabs?
Let me tell you this: I love tabs on top. It just makes more sense to me: you have more space to navigate, tabs are located in the otherwise useless top bar, webpages are one thing with the address bar. I don’t know, I just happen to like them. And remember Safari 4 Beta, the one with tabs-on-top? I loved them. Then they were gone.
Anyway, Mozilla’s implementation is simple: you can choose to activate them or not. They are enabled by default, but you can just right click and go back to normal tabs behavior. The interface design is quite pleasant. So are animations and dragging between tabs.
Should we trust Mozilla for this? That maybe they’ll release a decent version of Firefox for Mac OS X?
I think I will. Go download the latest Firefox 4 nightly version for Mac here.
#1
That's what Jake Moore said 1 month ago:
It doesn’t actually “save you space”, seeing as how the tabs are placed below the traffic lights, and create a new gap for themselves. Safari 4b, and chrome do it right.
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#2
That's what dino said 1 month ago:
Yuck. I’m also a fan of the tabs on top approach, but this implementation is poorly executed.
Tabs on top is the one area I see Google having a clear design advantage over its competitors.
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#3
That's what André Lersveen said 1 month ago:
You’re right, It doesn’t save space, Jake. However, if you look at ANY other decent app in OS X, you’ll se that none of them squish anything into the top bar, that’s reserved for the traffic lights, title and button to hide toolbars. Putting the tabs up there just isn’t natural, and honestly, I could give a rats ass about those extra 20px or whatever.
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#4
That's what Cody Fink said 1 month ago:
I hate to say it, but the Firefox beta had a less appealing version of tabs on top before this update. If you think this version is bad (it’s actually quite nice), then check out this screenshot:
http://grab.by/5wRo
I admit, I enjoy Firefox much more on Windows 7. The overall look and feel is more suited to Windows. On Ubuntu and Mac OS X, I’m a Chrome fan.
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#5
That's what Sidney said 1 month ago:
Okay. That gmail tab.. is that an addon? If not, how do I do it? I’d really love a gmail addon like the one for chrome; where it’ll update the gmail button with the unread count.
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#6
That's what David Levine said 1 month ago:
I’m a little disappointed in this implementation. While I’m happy about tabs on top, I wish they would’ve made the tabs replace the title bar. There’s just no need for it. Chrome still has the best implementation of tabs on top.
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