Yup, you're not alone: that orange button in the top left corner of Firefox 4.0 just won't move.

Fortunately, with the help of a Neowin forum thread and a little hacking, I am now the proud owner of a see-through Firefox button that's in-line with my tabs! If you'd also like to move that orange button -- or simply change its color! -- follow these easy steps:

• Locate your Profile directory -- click Help > Troubleshooting Information and then Open Containing Folder
• Now navigate to the Chrome directory
• Copy userChrome-example.css
• Rename your copy to userChrome.css
• Open userChrome.css your editor of choice and dump the following code in it:

#appmenu-button-container {

position: fixed !important;

}

 

#appmenu-button {

padding: 3px 18px 3px 18px !important;

margin-top:3px !important;

background-color: rgba(54, 121, 166, 0.2) !important;

}

 

#navigator-toolbox[tabsontop="true"] #TabsToolbar {

padding-left: 95px !important;

}

 

#navigator-toolbox[tabsontop="true"] #TabsToolbar {

padding-left: 105px !important;

padding-top:1px !important;

padding-right:98px !important;

}

Alternatively, download my userChrome.css file and copy it into the directory. Don't forget to rename it.

The second block (#appmenu-button) is the most important. You could easily change the color (54, 121, 166) or the opacity (0.2) -- simply change the values, save, and restart Firefox 4.0.

With some knowledge of CSS you could also move the button around (padding and margin), but I'll investigate more tomorrow. In the mean time, enjoy your less intrusive Firefox 4.0 menu!

(Incidentally, if you missed the previous post, Firefox 4.0 beta 1 is now available for download!)

Following on from last night's IE9 vs. Chrome 6 comparison, I've now pitched all four of the major Windows-based browsers against each other. On the same computer! At the same time! (God bless technology.)

As you will see from the video, Chrome (even with hardware acceleration turned on via command line switches) is in a distant last place, miles behind both Firefox and IE. Opera competes well up to a point, but eventually gives way to Firefox and IE with 1000 fishies swimming about.

I state in the video that Opera is hardware accelerated, but I could be wrong (we've confirmed that they have hardware acceleration devs on staff, but don't know what's under Opera's hood just yet). Chrome also performs very poorly, even though it (apparently) has hardware acceleration. Incidentally, if you want to turn on hardware acceleration in Firefox 3.7, follow this guide.

Both Firefox and IE9 use Direct2D to utilize the GPU's rendering power -- so it's probably no surprise that they both show very similar results. It's most apparent when comparing CPU use; IE9 and FF3.7 are both miles ahead in performance, but both show the lowest CPU utilization!

Still, I'm certain Chrome will feature full hardware acceleration soon enough. The thing I'm most interested in is whether we'll see cross-platform hardware acceleration. Direct2D doesn't exist on either Mac or Linux -- so we'll see how it pans out! Meanwhile, if anyone wants to pit Opera or Chrome against Firefox on Linux, I'd be very interested to see the results.