Meet The New Fox

Mozilla is getting ready for the new version of the hugely popular web browser that will be called Firefox 4 and has released the first beta version for the new edition of the browser. There are a few aesthetic changes in the new version of the browser such as the tabs that have been pushed up where the Menu bar originally was, much like in Opera and Chrome browsers.  The Menu bar instead been transformed into a drop-down menu on the upper left corner of the user interface (UI) labeled as ‘Firefox’. This feature was first seen with Chrome having a single button for their drop-down menu and later Opera used this feature and put up their Opera button on upper left hand corner, an idea which the newest edition of Firefox has borrowed. These changes will surely help by neatly arranging the menu items in one place for quicker access, thereby reducing the clutter in UI and make the new version more visually enhancing.

 
Other than these cosmetic changes, the new edition also sports a ‘Switch to Tab’ which according to them will help navigate more easily by switching to open tabs from the tab toolbar. Other than these cosmetic changes, the beta version gives a glimpse of what the final version will be like. It includes features such as a new Add-Ons Manager, support HTML5, CSS3, a new lightweight Jetpack framework and lots of other developer friendly features that will help make and use the browser for a more dynamic web environment.

One of the most important announcements has been the crash protection. Until now, if a module or a plugin such as Flash(yes, it frequently crashes!) crashes, the entire Firefox has to be shut down and restarted. This can be pretty annoying when, say, doing some important work or watching videos or maybe if someone is working with too many open tabs. Now, with this crash protection feature, only the crashed tab will have to be reloaded leaving other tabs (and the entire browser) virtually unaffected. This was first featured in Chrome browser and Firefox seems to have taken a cue from them.

Firefox 4 has other notable improvements such as new privacy controls, an inbuilt sync facility and it promises to be faster than ever. It will be available for Mac and Linux users too.

Try out the new beta version and be one of the first to test the newest edition of the popular web browser (click  here to download) . Check out more about the new browser on their official page here.

This post was originally guest authored by me for CrazyEngineers for their blog - Voice. You can visit the blog for the original article here