Mozilla Firefox 4 Released [Downloads]

Mozilla has finally released Firefox 4 build after 12 beta releases and two Release Candidates. According to Mozilla, Firefox 4 is “faster, easier and more awesome than ever“. Firefox adapted its looks to the minimalist UI trend ushered in by Google Chrome. It eliminates some elements from the default configuration such as the menu, bookmark and status bars while others have been included into multifunctional buttons.

Firefox has a single button in the top left part of the screen that encompasses all options you need, which somewhat has resemblance to the Opera’s button. Tab management has been greatly improved in this release through app tabs and the Panorama feature. App tabs act just like shortcuts to your favorite or frequently used sites, pinning them right next to the Firefox button and reducing their size to the website’s favicon.

firefox-4

Panorama offers you the possibility to work with groups of tabs in a very convenient manner. It is designed especially for the users handling large numbers of tabs. To snap to Panorama view you can use the Ctrl+Shift+E shortcut or click on the “Group your tabs” button at the end of the tab bar. It’s functionality includes creating new groups by simply drawing a rectangle with the mouse holding either left or right buttons, moving tabs from one group to another, naming each group as well as reshaping them or arranging the elements in the page. Search is also available, so you can easily focus on a certain website. If you want to send a specific tab to a different group you can easily do it from the regular interface of Firefox, from the tab’s context menu.

The address bar can be hidden completely but there is no way to bring it back when you need to type in a new URL in a fresh tab. Instead, it offers two shortcuts to show the menu bar (Alt and F10).

Coming back to the performance factor, the JavaScript performance alone has been improved by a factor of three when compared to the current stable Firefox 3 branch.

firefox-4-performance

Firefox 4 now comes with an improved web standards support, including better CSS3, HTML5 and web graphics compatibility. Other notable features include hardware acceleration support, support for the HTML5 video WebM format, out of process plugins for Macs (Linux and Windows have it built-in since Firefox 3.6), privacy enhancements and multi-touch support under Windows 7.

Download Firefox 4

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