Firefox 4: Beta 1 is Here

By  |  Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 4:18 pm

Mozilla has released Beta 1 of Firefox 4–an update with a more Chromelike, minimalist interface, an improved add-on manager (it occupies a full window rather than a teeny-tiny one), speed improvements, more support for emerging Web standards like HTML5 and Google’s WebM video format, and more. (Only the Windows version has the new interface so far–it’ll arrive for the Mac and Linux in a later beta.)

At the moment, I find myself in the weird situation of not having a favorite browser–I leap between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Flock without giving it much thought, and sometimes take side trips to IE and Opera. I am, however, rooting for Firefox 4 to be good: I love browser competition, and I don’t want it to devolve into a battle between Microsoft and Google, which is the likely scenario if Firefox doesn’t stay popular and inventive.

More thoughts to come, but I have to do some troubleshooting–the Windows version I downloaded and installed is refusing to load Web pages. Here’s Mozilla’s blog post on the new version.

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. Tech Says:
    July 6th, 2010 at 11:45 pm

    Thanks for the info. I'll have to give it a try.

  2. Hamranhansenhansen Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 2:17 am

    The lack of ISO MPEG-4 audio video support in Firefox is like a kind of suicide. Once IE9 ships, all name-brand PC's, tablets, and smartphones will support HTML5/MPEG-4 out-of-the-box. It's hard to see how Firefox fits in after that.

  3. Anonymous Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 4:08 am

    If they want to save space, they might as well copy Chrome and Opera 100% and move the tabs up between the menu button and window controls. The way it is now, you might as well stay with a traditional menu bar.

    I hope the Mozilla devs start working on Firefox's performance and memory management flaws; they got complacent and lazy after they hit 20% market share. Meanwhile I switched exclusively to Opera more than a year ago and haven't looked back.

  4. IcyFog Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 9:41 pm

    I find myself using Safari, Camino and Chrome more. Firefox might be on it's way out.

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