Mozilla have released the earliest public beta of Firefox 4, and while it’s not fully stable at the moment, the browser already includes some appealing changes that are well worth a closer look.
Take Flash, for example – are you tired of applets crashing your browsing session? Mozilla are too, and so beta 4 gains further crash prevention features to stop this from happening. If Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight go on the blink or lock up in that case they will no longer bring down the entire browser, and you can merely refresh the current page and try to view it again. Sounds decent to us.
One obvious interface fine-tune sees the tabs moved to the very top of the browser window, which Mozilla say this is giving them “top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing”. Everyone else will say it’s clearly borrowing from Chrome, however either way, it does make for a cleaner, simpler interface.
Next along the same lines, it’s good to set eyes on the menu bar replaced by a single Firefox button, top left of the screen. Clicking this gives you entry to nearly all of the options you want: New Window, Save Page As, Print, Find, History etc. As a consequence once more, it all helps to simplify the browser, cutting down the amount of places where you must click to look for commands, and leaving the greatest quantity of space unfilled for the web page you’re viewing.
The Add-Ons Manager has been overhauled, now taking up an entire tab of its own, and making it simpler to expose new-found extensions and manage the ones you have already.
And elsewhere there are privacy improvements, fresh support for HTML5 and CSS3, and several changes that may perhaps grow to be very useful in the future. Indexed DB, for example, will let websites save information locally, as a result, apps similar to GDocs can operate even when you’re no longer internet enabled.
There’s plenty to discover and performance seems high-quality for a beta. If you’d like to give it a check out, then download your copy here.
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