Win7 Taskbar and FF4 RC

posted on March 11th, 2011, 10:11 am

i was wondering what people think of the new (I say new, its been there since 7 was released ) windows 7 taskbar with its pinning and stuff. i have nearly filled mine with stuff i use often, has anyone else managed to fill it up? and do people generally think its nice. i like it, saves space and keeps programs i use a lot available easily.

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firefox 4 rc is out, im using it now. the betas could be installed separately incase they were crap u still had <4 available. but rc upgrades old ff to new. i think its really good.

the only thing that bothered me was that when u went from tab group mode (used to be called panorama) to a tab by clicking the tab image, it zooms it up, which takes a second or two of time , and looked choppy on my weak computer.

so the aboutconfig page has a boolean option to disable it called browser.panorama.animate_zoom

which makes it instant. other than that its a slick looking browser, plenty of new eye candy, features are there to back it too. i like it.

dialog boxes (such as the one saying new pms are ready to read on this forum) now appear differently, greying the screen and looking nicer.

mozilla are copying chrome now, with faster releases, with fewer features each time.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:15 pm

I love the Seven taskbar i keep my webbrowser (chrome ATM), the file explorer, and visual studio pinned. I dont fill it. Also idk about firefox but im liking chrome 10. I also saw some stuff about firefox 5 and it looked pretty cool.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:43 pm

I keep several things on it, but I also use a dock for my desktop icons.

As far as browsers go, I use chrome.  I used Firefox for a while, but it is just to slow and bulky for my tastes.  I actually tried IE9b recently and was pretty impressed by how clean and fast it is.  I can't believe I am saying this(i usually hate IE) but you should take a look at it.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 5:31 pm

a common complaint was that firefox was a bit slow, i didnt notice it much though. the new one, firefox 4 does feel a lot faster, pages load quicker, the browser itself loads fast. i think you should try see if its still too slow for you. and i have addons as well.

chrome has made a name for itself recently, it seems like a good browser. not enough features for me, rather simple, but gets the job done.

ie used to be so obviously the rubbish browser, but microsoft seem to have learned that they were getting it wrong and being punished by firefox and chrome, so they actually tried for ie9. ie9 rc is the current version, ie9 rtm comes out on monday. i did try ie9 beta, it looks a lot like most browsers now. its still way too integrated into windows and i dont think its features are as good as those browsers it copies (ff, opera, chrome etc), but its really improved.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 5:39 pm

chrome gets way better once you turn on page-prerendering and the gpu features in aboutflags

posted on March 11th, 2011, 5:48 pm

its funny, ie9 actually supports graphics acceleration as well, same as firefox. its surprising to see ie keep up with a feature that is so big. look how long they took to add tabbed browsing. does anyone browse without tabs now?

one thing i like about safari is that it stores pages as images when u visit them, then renders the image if u navigate back to that page, while in the background actually using the html etc. makes pages look like they load faster. i think that would be a good feature for other browsers.

problem is that steve jobs cant get anything right and the images get stored in a temp folder and safari wont delete them, privacy is awesome

posted on March 11th, 2011, 8:58 pm

I really like the new taskbar as well. I don't fill it though, I just keep internet, email, media player, and explorer on it.

As far as browsers go, I'm an IE person with the occasional use of Opera so I couldn't care less about Firefox. I haven't tried IE9 yet, mostly because I don't want to hassel with cleaning out the beta when the final comes around. But from what I've seen of it, it looks really good.

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on March 11th, 2011, 9:20 pm

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on March 11th, 2011, 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

IE 9 is in RC, not beta. And I'm pretty sure it will just update when it detects the rtm is out.

I don't use IE 9 because it doesn't support Linux, Mac OS, or XP (WTF Microsoft, you can't make your browser support your own product?) Microsoft should pay for using their browser to try to force people to use products Microsoft is selling.
Another reason is that I'm pretty sure it is doomed in the long term. Its release schedules are too slow, and it mostly ends up copying the competition. It may have caught up for the time being, but it will fall behind probably within the year.

As for the taskbar: I think it should be redesigned, since right now it almost always wastes about 80% of the screen width. I like the icon only view, but now there's just no need for all that space. I think a fluid taskbar that expands toward the middle when necessary would be better.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 9:26 pm

well xp is only half supported now. its understandable that they would abandon their old products, they want you to buy new ones lol.

xp is a decade old already. which is ages in computer terms. they dont make programs for windows 2000 any more.

i agree that microsoft are too slow, they only have their 1 team working on it, while firefox has a huge amount of collaboration.

i agree that they will likely fall behind again.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 9:54 pm

IE 9 is in RC, not beta. And I'm pretty sure it will just update when it detects the rtm is out.

I don't use IE 9 because it doesn't support Linux, Mac OS, or XP (WTF Microsoft, you can't make your browser support your own product?) Microsoft should pay for using their browser to try to force people to use products Microsoft is selling.
Another reason is that I'm pretty sure it is doomed in the long term. Its release schedules are too slow, and it mostly ends up copying the competition. It may have caught up for the time being, but it will fall behind probably within the year.

Yeah, I don't know whether it will or won't update. There was some other MS product, maybe it was Visual Studio 2010 or something which you had to make sure the pre-release versions were gone before installing the RTM.

As far as OS support goes, there hasn't been an IE for Mac in what, 10+ years, and to my knowledge there has never been one for Linux save using Wine (if that works, I don't know, I'm a Windows person). The lack of XP support stems from the fact that XP doesn't - and never will - have the runtimes which ship with Vista/7. IE9 was explicitly designed to integrate into the new Windows 7 environment. XP was good, but it's had it time, 2014 marks the end of XP support, the move to not support XP reflects that.

I also don't see what's wrong with not having a fast release schedule. I would rather they take their time and do a good job, than rush development trying to keep pace with others and do a crap job. Actually, looking a the release schedules for IE9 and FF4, they're about the same overall, although Mozilla is putting out a beta twice a month versus a release about every month and a half from Microsoft. If you want to nitpick, IE9 went to RC a month before FF4; and, it's scheduled to go to RTM in three days (3/14/11). Now draw your own conclusions, but it looks like IE9 is going faster than FF4. In the end, I don't think it really matters that IE is "behind". If anything, it lets them see what others do "right" so that they can make their version better.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 10:23 pm

Firefox is planned to have a faster release cycle (Firefox 5 later this year), we're just on the last bit of their older release cycle lengths, compounded by some delays for FF4.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 11:18 pm

believe it or not, but ie for mac was only stopped 8 years ago. not even 10. it was a poor browser, simply awful. m$ told everyone to go use safari lol. i used to use it a lot as my school computers dictated what software u got.

about release times, ie9 may have hit each stage earlier than ff4, but in general ie release new features very rarely, just endless security patches after people make public the vulnerabilities. ff 3.x.y added features a lot more often. chrome added features sometimes (their integer numbers change a lot without new features). the new ff schedule will have a new integer each time features are added likely.

posted on March 12th, 2011, 4:55 am

gpu renderding was first done by ie9 so they can come up with their own ideas lol. everyone else copied them.

posted on March 12th, 2011, 2:44 pm

gpu renderding was first done by ie9 so they can come up with their own ideas lol. everyone else copied them.

ie9 hasnt even been released lol, betas and platform previews dont count for anything.

oh and a non beta version of chrome already has it so they got to it first.

posted on March 14th, 2011, 8:55 am

True but it was IEs idea and then after they did it everyone else did it too.