Mozilla have released the first public beta of Firefox 4, and whilst it’s not exactly stable so far, the browser already includes a few worthy of note changes that are well worth a closer look.

Take Flash, for example – are you tired of applets crashing your browsing session? Mozilla are, too, and so beta 4 gains different crash avoidance features to inhibit this from happening. If Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight crash or lock up in that case they will no longer bring down the complete browser, and you can simply refresh the current page and attempt to view it again. Sounds fine to us.

One obvious interface tweak sees the tabs moved to the very top of the browser window, which Mozilla say this is giving them “top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing”. Everyone else will say it’s simply borrowing from Chrome, however either way, it does fit in for a cleaner, simpler interface.

Also along the same lines, it’s good to set eyes on the menu bar replaced by a solo Firefox button, top left of the screen. Clicking this gives you entry to a good number of the options you require: New Window, Save Page As, Print, Find, History and the rest. Furthermore again, it altogether helps to make simpler the browser, cutting down the amount of places where you have to click to look for commands, as well as leaving the biggest quantity of space available for the web page you’re looking at.

The Add-Ons Manager has been changed, now taking up an entire tab of its own, and making it easier to discover new-found extensions and handle the ones you have already.

And elsewhere there are privacy improvements, recent support for HTML5 and CSS3, and several changes that may perhaps turn out to be very useful in the future. Indexed DB, for instance, will permit sites to save data locally, therefore apps like GDocs can operate even while you’re not connected to the internet.

There’s enough to discover and performance seems good quality for a beta. If you’d like to give it a check out, then download your copy here.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 7:36 am and is filed under Browsers, FireFox, Freeware, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.