Firefox 4.01 beta has been available for testing for a few weeks now and I thought that it would be nice to help some of you get up and rolling with the new version. You will want to surf over to Mozilla and download the version of Firefox 4 Beta appropriate for your operating system. In this example we are working with the Mac OS X version. Once your download starts you will see something similar to the progress bar displayed in figure 1.
After the download has completes your system should unpack the disk image and mount it on the desktop presenting a mount icon as shown in figure 2.
Inside this mounted disk image you will see the familiar Mac OS X application installation screen. However in lieu of dragging the application to the ‘Applications’ folder icon as shown in figure 3 we will copy it to the desktop shown in figure 4.
I am copying Firefox 4 beta to the desktop is because it is a beta application and I do not wish to corrupt my stable copy of 3.x. Therefore, I will use this opportunity to rename the application bundle before placing it in the ‘Applications’ folder as displayed in figure 5.
Now that I have successfully renamed and copied the beta application to the ‘Applications’ folder without munging my production installation I can launch it without issue. Upon first launch you will be presented with the downloaded applications are potentially unsafe warning as shown in figure 6. This message is intended to protect users from themselves much in the same way that coffee cups are required to have a “Contents may be HOT’ warning. In any event, I usually just click ‘OK’ and proceed to the important tasks at hand.
Of course if you are like me then you will receive this notice advising you that you are indeed an idiot because you can only have one copy of Firefox open at one time. Yes I felt rather dumb when this popped up, mostly because on a FreeBSD or Linux where one can install from source you can have multiple versions of an application thus avoiding idiot-grams like the one in figure 7. Please note that because Mac OS X is actually a UNIX based operating (truthfully a close cousin to FreeBSD) one could use the MacPorts to install multiple copies of Firefox, but that’s really not within the scope of this text.
Now once I realized the error of my ways I shutdown the 3.x version I was running and of course happily received yet another warning to quit or save and quit as shown in figure 8. Obviously I chose the latter option saving the tabs I still had open.
Now finally after all of this I am able to successfully open Firefox 4 beta and interestingly enough it picked up the tabs I saved in version 3.x so I am potentially back up and rolling as if I hadn’t spent the last 30 minutes reading silly warning messages. To verify that things are indeed functional I opened the about page as displayed in figure 9.
Obviously this is a sign to rejoice as I have successfully completed my goal of installing the application without borking the previous version. With this step complete I can get down to business and actually put Firefox 4 beta through it’s paces. One thing I observed immediately is that this first beta is missing the top tabs of it’s Windows based counterpart. There is an explanation that the development team is working on this.
One other issue worth mentioning is that most of my plugins and add-ons are disabled in this version of Firefox. This is entirely understandable as many of the plugin and add-on developers are just starting to work with this new version and it will be some time before they are ready to update their applications. Still all of those misses aside I am most impressed with the stability of this beta application. I had one tab that was misbehaving and this new version caught the exception offering to nullify the tab thus saving me from a complete restart. I like it when things work as advertised.
At this point it looks as if Firefox 4 beta is well worth the trouble endured (no trouble really) to get things up and running. I intend to report further as I use the new version a bit more thoroughly. Until then if you’ve followed along I would like to invite you to return and comment with your findings as you test drive the beta application. Finally here are a few useful links related to the project.
Feedback:
http://feedback.mozilla.org/
Bug reporting:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Release notes:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b1/releasenotes/
Known issues:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b1/releasenotes/#issues
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for the BSD News Network.
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