Firefox 4: It's Here

After more than eight months in beta, Mozilla has made the final version of Firefox 4, the popular Web browser, available for download by everyone. In less than 24-hours (at the time of writing this), the Mozilla browser has racked up more than 4.5 million downloads already, comfortably beating out Internet Explorer 9’s 2.35 million downloads in its first 24 hours.

Firefox 4 is the next big version release for the browser after January 2010’s Firefox 3.6 release. It brings to the table a number of updates and changes to the look, feel and performance of the browser. Let’s take a look at what Mozilla are declaring as the biggest improvements:

1. Interface: Like Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome before that, Firefox 4 has adopted a minimalist design which gives more monitor real estate to the web page. In order to achieve this, Firefox 4 does away with the title bar and the status bar and squeezes in all the buttons and icons in the command bar together. The tabs row also moves on top of the URL bar (or as Mozilla calls it- the ‘Awesome’ bar) and all the usual options and settings have moved to the top left ‘Firefox’ drop-down menu (a design decision clearly inspired by Opera 11).

2. Tabs: Mozilla has also changed the way Firefox 4 handles tabs. First is the introduction of ‘App Tabs’ that lets you take the tabs that you always open when browsing and pin it to the command bar so that they always open the moment you open the browser. The second new concept is ‘Tab Groups’ that let you group different tabs together and name the groups so that you can still open multiple tabs but organize them in an efficient manner. As a result, you can have multiple groups open at the same time containing tabs relating to work, personal, social networking, entertainment, videos etc.

3. Performance: Mozilla claims that thanks to the JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, speeds have improved considerably. Firefox is also supposed to handle plug-in crashes better and as a result, a plug-in crash won’t affect the entire browser and will instead just result in the affected tab reloading. Like Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 also claims to make better use of hardware acceleration to render Web pages.

4. Security & Privacy: Apart from the regular security features such as Web page verification, anti-virus integration and anti-phishing measures, Firefox 4 also boasts of new features such as ‘Do Not Track’- a feature that informs Web sites you visit that you do not want your browsing behavior on that site recorded and tracked and automatic checking and updates of add-ons and plug-ins.

You can download Firefox 4 from Mozilla’s dedicated downloads page.

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