10 Reasons why I will not upgrade from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4!

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It has been a more than a month since the most anticipated browser Firefox 4 was shown off by Mozilla on 22^nd March. Later in April, Firefox broke the 100 million download mark (have a look at the amazing Firefox stat page here!) yet it is interesting to note that most Firefox users are still using to Firefox 3.6!

This trend was observed in stats revealed by StatCounter Global stat for Browser usage in April 2011. The graph shows that in April 2011, the usage share of Firefox 4 is less than half of Firefox 3.6; despite that Firefox has been around for more than a month!

Many people have opted to downgrade from Firefox 4 to Firefox 3.6.  Why is so that even with all its embellishments and added features, it’s surprising that Firefox 4 is still less popular than its previous version! Let’s have a look!

1. Major reason is that many extensions, that one had been accustomed to, may not supported by Firefox 4. A bulk of extensions is merely useless now. Parting with one’s dear extensions, is not easily acceptable!
2. The main window of Gmail is running slower in comparison of its older version. The issue has also been registered with Mozilla team.
3. Inconvenience in grouping tabs: Firefox 4 lets allows you to group one’s frequently accessed pages together by category, and then call them when required. But as investigated in previous post, the job of categorizing, itself is very tedious and nothing less than a job itself! Furthermore, Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul  writes “the feature still has some fundamental failings that sabotage its usefulness. The single biggest weakness of tab groups is that you can’t move them between windows (…)The real deal-breaker for me, however, is the difficulty of finding misbehaving tabs” Comparing with Google’s Chrome he further said: ”In Chrome, I could have trivially solved the problem by cracking open the browser’s built-in process manager and sorting by CPU usage.”
4. People who desire to use Firefox Sync with their mobile device will have to update their mobile browser to the latest Firefox 4 for mobile release. But unfortunately, Firefox 4 on Android is still facing major stability issues, particularly for Droid. Many users have reported that Droid freezes due to Firefox 4. Mozilla, in this contrast must work on substantially increase stability with Android phones, owing to the fact that Android is one of the leading smartphone in today’s market.
5. If you try to start Firefox using a locked profile, it will crash.
6. The Switch to Tab feature:  The feature lets you to manage tabs in a new way! This feature helps you to jump to the website you’re trying to reach if it’s already open in another tab, while typing the URL. The feature is helpful but requires improvements according to many critics. Preston Gralla writes for Computerworld pointed out that ”Any search results that match open tabs get mixed in with your history list, previous searches and so on will make it difficult to see at a glance if your matches are in open tabs.”
7. Users have reported that Firefox 4 is using as much as 500 Mb of Virtual memory!
8. Kaspersky also does not support Firefox 4. ⁽¹⁾
9. Some users of Adobe Reader have experienced instability when viewing PDF documents in the browser. Mozilla has calimed that uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe Reader X will most probably resolve the issue.
10. Another issue reported to Mozilla was that if anyone attempts to customize your toolbars to include the Location Bar or Search Bar in the Menu Bar, and later toggle the state of the Menu Bar between shown and hidden, Firefox will crash!

Scared and want to downgrade? Read this!

Note : (1) We are Linux Users

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