07 July 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter
Following hot on the heels of Opera, which launched its new and improved web browser last week, Mozilla has made the beta version of Firefox 4 available to users.
As well as focusing on enhanced performance and accelerated hardware support, PC Pro reports that the new version of Mozilla's popular open source browser also includes an updated add-on manager and crash protection for third-party plug-ins.
The most instantly noticeable change in the appearance of Firefox 4 is that webpage tabs have now been moved to the top of the screen rather than in the browser window, similar to rival Google Chrome. In a post on the Mozilla blog, lead developer Mike Beltzner explained that this was done to make switching between tabs easier.
"We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser," Mr Beltzner said.
"Also, if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista the Menu bar was replaced with a single Firefox button so you can get to the most used options with just one click."
Although Firefox is still the world's second most popular web browser, Mozilla hopes that the new and improved Firefox will boost uptake of its browser, which reportedly reached a plateau in downloads over the last year - despite increasing competition in the European web browser market following Microsoft's introduction of a browser ballot screen in March.
Mozilla is keen for users to give their feedback after downloading the Firefox 4 beta from their site, with a simple button that allows users to state whether Firefox made them 'happy' or 'sad', with accompanying reasons why.
The company plans to release updated beta versions every few weeks based on this feedback, before releasing the finished product later this year.
"Lazy frame construction, hardware graphics acceleration, more asynchronous I/O and the start of our JavaScript performance optimisations are just some of the things we're doing to make Firefox faster," Mozilla said.
Mozilla releases Firefox 4 beta
Following hot on the heels of Opera, which launched its new and improved web browser last week, Mozilla has made the beta version of Firefox 4 available to users.As well as focusing on enhanced performance and accelerated hardware support, PC Pro reports that the new version of Mozilla's popular open source browser also includes an updated add-on manager and crash protection for third-party plug-ins.
The most instantly noticeable change in the appearance of Firefox 4 is that webpage tabs have now been moved to the top of the screen rather than in the browser window, similar to rival Google Chrome. In a post on the Mozilla blog, lead developer Mike Beltzner explained that this was done to make switching between tabs easier.
"We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser," Mr Beltzner said.
"Also, if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista the Menu bar was replaced with a single Firefox button so you can get to the most used options with just one click."
Although Firefox is still the world's second most popular web browser, Mozilla hopes that the new and improved Firefox will boost uptake of its browser, which reportedly reached a plateau in downloads over the last year - despite increasing competition in the European web browser market following Microsoft's introduction of a browser ballot screen in March.
Mozilla is keen for users to give their feedback after downloading the Firefox 4 beta from their site, with a simple button that allows users to state whether Firefox made them 'happy' or 'sad', with accompanying reasons why.
The company plans to release updated beta versions every few weeks based on this feedback, before releasing the finished product later this year.
"Lazy frame construction, hardware graphics acceleration, more asynchronous I/O and the start of our JavaScript performance optimisations are just some of the things we're doing to make Firefox faster," Mozilla said.
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