Mozilla unveils Firefox 4 beta

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 7 Jul 2010 at 08:15

Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 4.

The latest version of the open-source browser features a new add-on manager, crash protection from third-party plug-ins, more suppport for CSS3 and better performance with accelerated hardware support, Mozilla said.

The most obvious change is the tabs have moved to the top of the screen, following the lead of rival Google Chrome. "We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser," noted lead developer Mike Beltzner in a post on the Mozilla blog. "Also, if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista the Menu bar was replaced with a single Firefox button so you can get to the most used options with just one click."

New from the last version, Firefox 4 will include support for HD video via the WebM standard, with support for a full-screen video API coming soon. The next betas for Firefox 4 will also support other HTML 5 technologies, such as scalable vector graphics for animation and web forms.

Does Firefox make you happy?

The beta will include a simple new feedback button that lets users say what feature made them happy or sad.

It's only the first beta, with Firefox promising to release a new one every two or three weeks until the final version arrives. Subsequent betas will feature Sync, which carries bookmarks, history and open tabs to different devices or computers, as well as more privacy controls, upgrades to Mac and Linux version interfaces and, as ever, faster browsing.

"Lazy frame construction, hardware graphics acceleration, more asynchronous I/O and the start of our JavaScript performance optimisations are just some of the things we're doing to make Firefox faster," Mozilla said on its site.

The Firefox 4 beta is available to download here. It's currently only available for Windows, with Mac and Linux support to follow soon, Mozilla said.