The browser wars are really starting to heat up, with Internet Explorer 9 beta to go live within a few weeks, Google just releasing Chrome 6, and now Mozilla that released Firefox 4 beta, one can’t but wonder who will take the crown of these next generation browsers.
As Google has done with Chrome, Mozilla has also gone and altered the look of Firefox 4 by moving tabs right to the top of the screen giving it top visual priority and modifying the default navigation icons a bit.
Apart from the changes in looks, Firefox 4 also features synchronization, allowing you to sync all your browser setting, passwords, bookmarks and open tabs across multiple devices. Managing tabs also got allot easier now that Firefox 4 allows you to drag and drop tabs in a manageable group that you can organize, name and arrange.
Under the hood is where it matter most for Firefox 4, the browser now allows you take advantage of your graphical hardware by rendering pages making use of Direct2D by default and with support for DirectX 10. Mozilla also introduced a new Audio API that exposes the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 making it easy for developers to use JS to read and write audio data.
HTML 5 support has also been souped up with a brand new HTML 5 parser giving full support for web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling in Firefox 4. Also support for CSS3 features like Transitions and Transformations makes it easy to add elegant animations to Web pages.
All in all Firefox 4 beta looks set to become a great browser, lets just hope Mozilla has sorted out the high memory usage that made usage of previous versions of their browser unbearable for me. You can grab yourself a copy of Firefox 4 beta here.