Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1

Mozilla developers have recently released the first beta of Firefox 4.0 web browser. Many new changes can be seen in Firefox 4.0. The most significant change in this version is the new user interface. Browser tabs are now located on top of the address bar by default (on Windows only – OS X and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change) just like in Google Chrome web browser. But users do have the option to revert the user interface to the old Firefox design.

A second major change that cannot go undetected is the addition of the Firefox button on Windows Vista and Windows 7 that replaces the menu bar, and looks very similar to the One button present in Opera web browser. It will be shown if the user decides to hide the menu bar in the browser.

firefox 4

Other notable changes are as follows:

  • You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
  • New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
  • Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
  • The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
  • Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
  • CSS Transitions are partially supported.
  • Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
  • Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
  • Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
  • An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
  • Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
  • Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
  • More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
  • Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
  • CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
  • New HTML5 parser.
  • Support for more HTML5 form controls.

Users can views a WebM video about the new release here. Interested users can read about the release notes of Firefox 4.0 beta 1 here.

[ Download Firefox 4.0 beta 1 for Mac, Windows and Linux , Multi-language for all platforms ]

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