Hot on the heels of Internet Explorer’s v9 release, Firefox 4 is out. The highly anticipated latest version of the Mozilla Foundation‘s flagship product, Firefox has a slew of new features, and in particular touts its huge boost in speed that puts it back on par with Google’s Chrome browser.
What’s New?
Firefox 4 boasts a slew of new features and you can read the full list in the release notes, while we point out the highlights:
- A new JavaScript engine that is 6x faster than what’s in Firefox 3.6.
- Firefox Sync is built-in. We talked about Weave before it became Sync.
- Firefox now looks a lot of Chrome (and IE and Opera) in the way that it puts the tabs at the top and gets rid of a lot of the window’s extra footprint including menus and borders. It’s the in-way to build browsers until the next new thing comes along…
- Protection against crashes by subsystems or plugins like Flash causing the whole browser to crash.
- Panorama – a new visual overview of all open tabs, similar to some existing extensions for FF 3.x.
That is just a taste, and developers in particular will be chomping at the bit to test out some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 support, so look forward to even more websites moving into the new era as older browser fall by the wayside.
You can download Firefox 4 right now and add to the more than 11 million as of the time of this writing!