"Firefox 4 beta 1 includes dozens of major features and improvements," wrote Firefox Director Mike Beltzner in a blog. "By testing them early, we'll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions."
Visual Improvements
The most noticeable improvement to Firefox 4 has to do with the look of the browser. "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," Beltzner wrote. "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."
The other big visual change is the addition of support for the new HTML5-based WebM video format being championed by Google. "If you're part of the YouTube HTML5 beta, WebM videos should play pretty well," Mozilla blogger Christopher Blizzard wrote.
What's more, Mozilla's initial Firefox 4 beta integrates strong support for hardware-based video acceleration. "If you're using HTML5 video and you go full screen, we'll use OpenGL on Macs or Linux and DirectX 9 on Windows to accelerate video rendering," Blizzard wrote. "If you're on Windows 7 or an updated Windows Vista, we also have full support for D2D-enabled rendering."
These changes are welcome improvements and part of the heated-up browser war, noted Al Hilwa, program director of applications development software at IDC.
"While browsers themselves are free to consumers, they have become money-making gateways to to the Internet, and, as gatekeepers, browser vendors stand to gain financially by charging for routing to search engines and other potential sites," Hilwa said. "Mozilla makes quite a bit of money out of Google, which explains why Google is so eager to be a leader in the browser space itself."
Hilwa expects that all browsers will implement the WebM video standard within a year. "But it may take another three to five years for users to be on the latest browser releases, so the journey to standardize the video inside of HTML is just beginning," he said.
Other Enhancements
Under the hood, Firefox 4 integrates a new add-on manager that provides users with more space to handle add-ons, themes and plug-ins. Developers also will be able to build Firefox add-ons more quickly using the new Jetpack SDK to safely connect to existing libraries using js-ctypes.
With Firefox 4, users will no longer have to restart the browser in order to install a new add-on or recover from a crash. "When a plug-in crashes or freezes, you can resume browsing by simply refreshing the page," Beltzner wrote.
Firefox is known for its add-ons, where it has established one of the richest environments for new capabilities, positioning it as a platform unto itself, Hilwa noted. "We are seeing these HTML extensions and apps becoming important for browser vendors because it creates stickiness with users," Hilwa said. "Safari is building a more robust extension system as well."
Future beta releases of Firefox 4 will enable users to synchronize settings, passwords, bookmarks, history, open tabs, and other customizations across multiple devices. Mozilla also expects to add "support for a JavaScript-driven full-screen API for video," Blizzard wrote.
