Fedora 13/14 only have Firefox 3.6 in their repositories, so I decided to install the “Spot” repo and try out the new Firefox 4.0:

su -
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo
yum install firefox4

You can also get it from the Remi repo.

It seems to have copied a lot of the GUI changes from Google Chrome – you now have the “Firefox Button” which replaces the menubar for all preferences etc; just like Chrome’s spanner icon, tabs have been moved to the top of the window, and the statusbar is gone.

The bookmarks toolbar has been replaced by a button, which is handy for netbooks with small screens, but on my 24″ 1920×1200 LCD I put the toolbar back on – you can configure it back again like all the new features, so if you want you can make 4.0 look like 3.6

It seems a bit faster than 3.6, although the quoted 5x I’d say is crap. Tab grouping looks handy as does app tabs.

Update: urgh, it seems for the sake of the Mac fanbois, they’ve removed folder icons from the bookmarks menus – think of sub-directories inside the personal toolbar.

To fix this create ~/.mozilla/firefox//chrome/userChrome.css with the following content:

menu.bookmark-item > .menu-iconic-left {
  visibility: visible;
}

You can also set this as a Gnome-wide option using GConf:

gconftool-2 -s --type=bool /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true

Or if you’d prefer to stick to not displaying the icons but want to remove the whitespace from the menu where the icon should go, use this: