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.

Being a web developer I work with different kinds of browsers all the time, and since Google Chrome was released there was no turning back to my previous favourite Firefox. Two years in and Google Chrome still does not disappoint.

Since Google Chrome’s first beta release two years back the browser has come a long way, holding more than 7.5% of the world browser market share. This may not sound like a lot, but if you compare it to browsers like Opera that has been in the market for more than than 10 years and only still hold 2.4%, its clear that Google Chrome is catching up on competitors.

Google Chrome version 6 marks the second anniversary of the Web Browser that is built around speed and simplicity. The new version 6 or Chrome features a built in flash plugin, minor modification to the look, form autofill, and extension and autofill syncronization across computers.

In addition, Google Chrome also kept its support for HTML 5 top notch, making it even more appealing as a browser of choice while keeping it fast, simple and secure.

It is without a doubt that HTML5 is the future of the web. With almost all the major web browsers already starting to support HTML5 what has you as Web Developer done to become familiar with HTML5?

With HTML5 allot can be done using only HTML and Javascript code where previously Flash or Silverlight was needed to accomplish the same task. Things like video and audio playback can be done natively with HTML5 without the need for any third party application. Developing 2D and 3D games also just became allot easier. With the new HTML5 canvas developers can now do 2D and 3D graphics with just a few simple lines of Javascript code.

The question is what have you as Web Developer done to become more familiar with the new HTML5 capabilities? Have you started reading up on it and tried your hand at some examples?

Most mobile phones out there today does not support Flash or Silverlight, even the new iPad which I would say was designed to be a web device does not support these third party applications, but one thing they do support is HTML5. This is why I would say it is so important for Web Developers to start experimenting with HTML5.

I took the weekend to do some tests and familiarise myself with HTML5 and I must say I am impressed. I will be doing some basic tutorials during the next couple of days to showcase the capabilities of HTML5 and just how easy it really is.

Are you HTML5 ready?