Meh. One of the smoothest features of Chrome (that won a lot of adherents) was how you could close lots of tabs quickly without moving the mouse (i.e. the tabs only re-size after you move the mouse away). Same for opening tabs. How did FF4 not copy this? It looks just like Chrome only crappier.
That small of a nicety overshadows all of the other great things about Firefox 4?
Also, the Firefox team is implementing that but it didn't make it into this release. You can find out all sorts of things they are working on at http://wiki.mozilla.org.
Down-vote, really? I was just giving my first impression, which was 'not better than Chrome' and 'looks clunky'.
Also, Chrome has had that feature for over a year and in that time it's won a lot of praise from a lot of places. Granted, it's just one little feature that doesn't matter that much... but that's what people refer to when they speak of "polish" and "user experience" and I think that stuff matters more to people than you might think.
It's probably for the "only crappier". Makes you sound like an annoying Digg refugee. Read the guidelines at the bottom of HN, it covers both tone/language and complaining about getting downvoted.
I alter FF to put the close button at the end of the tab bar in one fixed location. (it's an about:config option) I like that it doesn't move, mimics the OS Window-close mouse movement (in Windows) but MOST importantly, I think it's a complete waste of space to have an X on every tab.
I had that for FF 3, but now that the tabs are on top it just feels a lot more like Chrome where I'm used to having it on each tab, so I've moved them back on the tabs.
Btw, the relevant option in about:config is "browser.tabs.closeButtons"
Values...
0 - One close button only on the active tab.
1 - Each tabs has its own close button (default)
2 - Removes all close buttons (no close button, right click to select option to close the tab).
3 - Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip bar.
Try Multiple Tab Handler - you select as many tabs as you want using standard list-selection behavior (shift-click or control-click) and do whatever you want (for instance, close) all of them at once.
