I absolutely love Firefox's Awsome Bar; I now do most of my surfing using it, rarely go directly to my bookmarks. But the look of the Firefox window was getting old.

I did attempt to adapt to Chrome, but it does not suit my browsing style (your mileage will vary!). Earlier this year I downloaded Firefox 4 Beta 8, with all the functionality of Firefox and a much more modern (sparer) interface. It had a few bugs, but was good enough for me to uninstall Firefox 3.6 Several add-ons are incompatible at this time; none of them was a deal breaker for me.

I just downloaded the newest beta, 9. The bugs that I had noticed seem gone, though I am sure there are quite a few left.

If you use Firefox and are comfortable with pre-release software let me suggest that you give it a try.

RC planned for late February, but there are reportedly still many hard blocker bugs.

I've been running Minefield 4.0 beta (Firefox, but daily builds) on linux for the past few months, and apart from some extension problems, I have to say it's doing great, and I've not really had any other problems with it. Current version is 4.0 beta 10. In fact it may make me switch to Firefox in my Mac environment when it's finally released

However I wouldn't advise anybody to run the daily builds, unless you know exactly what you're doing, as these are not considered stable.

RC probably out next week!

Read an interesting paragraph on beta usage of browsers (part of yet another article on market share, IE vs Firefox vs Chrome):

Google Chrome 10 just released today

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en...ome.html?hl=en

More than five million people have downloaded the latest version of Firefox since its release a day ago.

Within its first 24 hours, more than 5.5 million users had downloaded Firefox 4. However, that falls short of the 8 million who downloaded version 3 on its release day in 2008.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12829113

PS: FF v3 users - there is an update to v3.6.16

Let me strongly suggest that FF v3 users download FF v4. I downloaded it as a beta in early January, and have found it way better than v3. Of course browsing styles differ, this is one user's opinion

FF v4 is awesome.... I love it and don't think I'll go back to Chrome. I started using Chrome recently but the privacy settings are too limited and apparently it uses your history/cookies to serve you targeted adds.... this did it for me and I switched back to the good old FF.

The only reason I choose Chrome was its simplistic design and of course the auto translate...which is really helpful if you don't know much German.

I downloaded it this morning and like it a lot so far. I had been using Chrome more often lately, but have been getting annoyed by the lack of an ad-blocker on Chrome (but we can't really expect Google to put that in there, can we?). I hope my good early experience with FF4 continues...

Chrome appears to have left out little things that FF v3 has such as View Image ( which I find very useful on EF to embed pictures ).

Try using ; with some luck it will point you to AdBlock for Chrome

Thanks for that! For some reason, I just figured Google wouldn't support something that blocks them making money. I guess they must still get the page views without us actually seeing the ads, eh?

Have used firefox for quite some time, however at some point it started to crash permanently for no apparent reason....so i had to move back to explorer.....ppl suggest to try opera...might just do that....

Mozilla ships Firefox 5 beta, final release coming next month, just installed it, no major changes visible yet.