A couple of days ago, I upgraded Firefox to 4.0 on my Windows 7 machine. It’s freaking awesome. I love how you can mouse over the Firefox icon and it will show you previews of each tab: freakin’ sweet!

I was also pleased to see that most of my addons (I’m really picky about what addons I install) were still compatible or already had updates suitable for the new version.

I have no complaints about Firefox 4.0… in Windows 7.

In Windows XP, it’s another story altogether. First of all, it’s a resource hog. I had 5 tabs open for an hour or so and Firefox 4 went from using about 150M of memory to over 600! Furthermore, I was unable to kill Firefox from the Task Manager and had to close it manually.

The nice tabbed effects I saw in Windows 7 also don’t appear in the XP variant. I’m writing this post in Google Chrome while I rollback to Firefox 3.6.16.

Another annoyance of using Firefox 4.0 in Windows XP is that some plugins, like Firebug don’t work as well. You get a half-window every time you open a new tab. It’s annoying.

The Mozilla Team makes you feel scared to stay at 3.6 by warning you that “Firefox 3.6.x will be maintained with security and stability updates for a short amount of time.”

While I normally agree with that line of thinking, until Firefox 4.0 runs well in XP, I’m going to stick with the rollback. Sorry, Mozilla Team!

By the way, if you haven’t dropped Outlook for Thunderbird yet, you should really look into it. For starters, it runs much better than Outlook, and it finds messages faster.