Finally its arrived. Mozilla has surprised the technology world this evening by officially releasing Firefox 4 Beta 1. The download is officially available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. The final version of the browser, however, is expected to be available either by the end of this year, or early next year — provided that all goes according to schedule.
From improved HTML5 support, plugin crash “airbags”, to a redesigned graphical user interface, we’re feeling pretty confident that Firefox 4 will be taking off quite quickly.
- New Add-Ons Manager: gives you more space to manage your Add-Ons, Themes and Plugins. Customizing your browser has never been easier!
- HD Video: Watch hardware-accelerated, super-smooth, HD-quality HTML5 video on YouTube using the new WebM format.
- Privacy improvements: Mozilla always puts privacy first, and this latest beta fixes flaws in some Web standards that could expose your browser history.
- Crash Protection: Experience uninterrupted browsing (now available on all platforms) – when a plugin crashes or freezes, you can resume browsing by simply refreshing the page.
- Performance: We know that performance is important. In this version, we focused on improving responsiveness at start-up and during page loads. This is just the beginning for performance improvements in Firefox 4.
Change log/release notes can be found here.