"And the typography engine that does kerning so badly that it renders several letter combinations in normally clear fonts literally illegible at smaller sizes used by many web sites."
The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.
> The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.
That's interesting, because every other browser I've ever used on my WinXP system (including Firefox up to 3.6) could display a 'T' followed by another letter without screwing up the positioning, as can every other piece of software I use on the system for that matter.
I suspect you are mistaken, and Firefox 4 is actually using something other than vanilla Windows typography where it didn't before.
> Like what [terrible usability issues]?
Well, just off the top of my head...
They messed up just about everything on the address/history/awesome/whatever bar: refresh is now a tiny button on the other side of the screen, home is even further over squashed between icons for extensions, you are supposed to realise (presumably through some divine revelation) that holding down the mouse button over the back icon is how you jump back by more than one page, there is a tiny, almost invisible arrow on the right of the tab line that shows all tabs and lets you open a Tab Groups page with a weird UI that doesn't fit in at all, etc.
They moved "Bookmark all tabs" from an obvious place on the Bookmarks menu to the context menu when you right-click a single tab. (A Google for "Firefox 4" "bookmark all tabs" currently returns nearly 30,000 hits.)
Go to Tools|Add-ons with nothing open and you have no obvious way back to a regular browser tab.
Autocomplete of password fields on forms seems to be unreliable.
I'll stop there, because I think the point is made well enough.
Firefox 4 still uses GDI on Windows XP for font rendering. I'm surprised, because the majority of the complaints came from its switch to DirectWrite on Vista and 7; DirectWrite still has display issues, though they're Microsoft's problem, not Mozilla's.
Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button. And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.
> Also, try right-clicking the back icon, rather than holding down the mouse button.
Sure, you can get the list either way, but why change from the widespread convention of having a down-arrow for a drop-down list as earlier versions did? The newer version is less discoverable, and making that sort of change without a good reason is just poor usability, pure and simple.
> And using the toolbar's Customize system to move Refresh and Stop and Home wherever you want them.
I hadn't even realised Firefox 4 still had such a Customize option until you mentioned it. To activate it, I have to navigate my mouse cursor to a region about 3-4px wide (on my 1920x1200 screen) between some of the areas on the bar, and right-click, even if the mouse cursor has already changed to the left-right arrow in some of those places. Once again, this is just poor usability (as is moving the buttons around in the first place when upgrading from an existing Firefox 3 installation that had them in a different place where they could still go).
What you're complaining about is called "kerning pairs" and is considered to be superior text layout technique. Most professionally laid out text in print uses this. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning. Perhaps you aren't used to it.
I'm well aware of kerning, thanks. Firefox 4 is simply getting it wrong on WinXP systems, closing up far too aggressively after 'T' and sometimes other letters like 'Y' in many fonts commonly used in web design. (See the link I posted earlier for screenshots.)
The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.
"And the terrible usability issues."
Like what?