The highly anticipated update to the Mozilla Firefox family has finally been released to the public, and so far it’s proving to be well worth the wait! Featuring a re-vamped user interface, a powerful new JavaScript engine and some new water-tight security features it is a force to be reckoned with.
Mozilla have introduced support for more HTML5 features, notably HTML5 video formats such as WebM and an audio API that makes it easy for developers to work with audio data. This is obviously excellent news for the web community that more browsers are supporting the new and exciting technologies that are available today, however Firefox still has a bit of catching up to do when you compare it to the support offered by Google Chrome and Safari. A useful website I use to show which features are supported by my browser is html5test.com.
The updated interface Firefox has adopted is an obvious nod to Google Chrome and I think it works brilliantly, albeit for a bit of a gear change when you first use it. If you’re anything like me and consistently have a high number of tabs open then you will definitely appreciate the new App Tab feature. The App Tabs allow you to “pin” frequently visited sites to your tab bar as a smaller button sized tab in order to free up space.
There are some reassuring new security features in this release which I am personally extremely pleased to see. You can see the full details of these updates on their security page.
As with most things of this nature, it all boils down to personal preference, but if you’re a regular Firefox user then you will definitely appreciate the new features of Firefox 4.
Visit the official Firefox 4 download page.
