Notices

I found it to be pretty good in comparison to previous versions ....

I think quite the opposite? I didn't see so much improvements...
If n900 had 512mb ram, that would be another story

Works pretty well. I never tried the other versions o I have no way to compare them but it may be slower than MicroB but not awful. Some of the UI needs some getting used to like the left, right and top tool bars. This is the only way I've gotten Facebook Places to work in a browser and it worked flawlessly. I'm probably going to switch just for the convenience of tabs.

You're saying that a web browser should consume more than the OS itself in term of RAM?

A good and optimised application consume next to nothing in term of system resource. Clearly the RC version isn't good enough to use.

They need a lot more works to make it usable or to replace builtin web browser.

Another disappointing thing are gestures, its not implemented. To zoom you'll have to either double tab or use the Volume buttons. I find it unnecessary inconvenience sometimes. Firefox always display picture in zoom mode on Facebook. You'll have to keep pressing the volume to see the picture on the screen.

Bug:
Type with virtual keyboard and then press outside the virtual keyboard but the text in the text box became blank. You'll have to press Enter to leave text on screen.

Nope, it's so slow it's unusable - that's on a freshly booted stock device and very few apps running. Fennec continues to use CPU (15-20%) even when minimized and sitting on the opening home page - this is inexcusable. Loading up a basic staple such as news.bbc.co.uk takes 4-5 times longer than it would in MicroB. Load two or three sites and the entire device starts to become unresponsive.

I've installed and tested pretty much every nightly for the last goodness knows how many months (at least 9 months) and during that time there seems to have been zero focus on improving performance on Maemo. Either the developers are not interested, or they know they're flogging a dead horse as the N900 doesn't have enough memory (although Opera Mobile, and of course MicroB, don't appear to suffer from the same lack-of-memory problem).

So here we are, with a release candidate for Firefox 4.0 that is bound to underwhelm (if not be a downright embarrassment) as it's massively outperformed in every possible way by the stock browser and now by Opera Mobile 11 too, a product that was knocked together for fun in a few weeks.

Harsh words maybe, but it's the truth and needs saying as the elephant in the room has been ignored for too long: Fennec/Firefox Mobile 4.0 on Maemo is a huge, huge disappointment and not worth installing.

am running beta 6 which sometimes works well....is this better than this build>(generally still slow to load but does play aljazeera news stream which is something i need)
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http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=69206

Well having used FF4 a bit more, I have to say that when browsing sites that are fairly light, i.e no flash content or heavy JavaScript stuff, it's actually pretty fast. Unfortunately those kinds of sites are more the exception than the norm today. And, really, the memory footprint simply doesn't allow you to do much multitasking without trashing hundreds of megs into the world's slowest swap.

I have been using nightly builds for months and must say the Rc1 is a horrible step backwards. Nightly build 4b6pre20110305 is so fast and stable compared to RC1 and 4.1alphas that I REALLY wonder what happened in the last 10 days. Esp when trying to scroll on zoomed pages RC1 and later often freeze for several seconds up to a minute.
In 4b6pre this does not happen at all. If they make Rc1 the final they will face a lot of justified flak.
I will stick with 4.0b6pre-20110305 until this issue is fixed.

I am using Firefox 4.1 alpha nightly release for fun. Use Opera Mobile for internet reading be it on these forums or blogs. Use microb for everything else.

there are pros and cons, yea its slow probably because dev team wont really be focussing on optimising it for maemo, understandibly. But being able to use websites in their desktop glory is magnificent. Page rendering is improved quite a bit. Flash slacks it down further. Interface is beautiful but not entirely usable. Killing a page or moving back and forth seems utterly slow.

it is quite usable but its no microb. For me microb is still the king and its interface for handling multiple pages is far better than either Opera Mobile 11 or Firefox 4.1 alpha.

Wishful thinking but i would like UI of microb with personas of firefox with virtual keyboard + text-wrapping of opera with desktop engine + flash plugin running .. lol i know crazy

Not being able to open links in background renders microb pretty useless for me on forums etc.

Firefox isn't useable in its current state (mem, slow).

So, yes. Opera for reading, microb for everything else.