The All New Firefox 4 - Bigger, Better, Fastest!
Online, March 29, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Firefox 4 Quick Facts
Publisher: Mozilla
System requirements: Intel Pentium 4 or newer processors that supports SSE2
Minumum RAM required: 512 MB
Operating System: Windows 2000/Windows XP/Windows Server 2003/Windows Vista/Windows 7/Mac
firefix 4 new interface
The Interface
The Mozilla Firefox 4 sports a clean and streamlined look with a view to simplify the browser maintaining its flexibility. By default, Firefox 4 shows the address bar, a search field, the back/forward/reload/home buttons, the tab bar, and an orange "Firefox" button in the upper-left corner. The orange coloured Firefox button hides all the menu options that you are accustomed to use in the older version of Firefox. Like its other competitors, Firefox has done away with the menu bar and provides maximum importance to the web page being viewed.
Pinning Web Apps
Another incredible feature of Firefox 4 is its ability to pin the websites on the tab bar. A Chrome-inspired feature to which Firefox is catching up a bit. Open up any Web app( Web page) in a new tab, right click on the tab, and then select "Pin as App tab". This will add a tab showing the webpage's icon on the far left side of the browser. Whenever your web page updates something, the pinned tab will turn blue. However, the browsers have been giving up these features, so it's a little down siding on the Firefox side.
Firefox 4 web apps pinning
The Inside Stuff
Mozilla Firefox 4 comes with improved JavaScript engine which makes it 3xfaster to its previous version. It also has new features designed for improved page loading and rendering better performance. Its JavaScript tests on the Sun Spider 0.91 benchmark revealed that there may be variation on the mileage based on your system hardware but there is no denying that Firefox 4 is much faster at handling JavaScript than Firefox 3.6. With improved JavaScript it has also made up to its HTML 5 performance.
Tracking Protection List
Like IE 9, Firefox 4 has also added this feature in it to prevent sites from being able to track what you do online. When you enable tracking protection in Firefox, it'll use HTTP headers to tell the site that you don't want to be tracked. A simplified way of putting it is that when you visit a Website, Firefox will send a message to the site that you don't want to be tracked. The problem is that Websites don't have to honour this request, thus rendering the Tracking Protection feature useless. Mozilla is working to make this feature an industry standard, so hopefully things will improve with time.
Firefox Sync
Users of multiple computers may appreciate Firefox Sync which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, history, open tabs and other settings between multiple computers running Firefox 4. It's not a new feature, having previously been available as an optional add-on for previous versions.
Firefox Panorama
Firefox 4 comes with a new tab management facility called Firefox Panorama. When you summon it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+E, it shows a view of categorized groups of all the tabs being viewed presently. You can drag a tab out of a group and then add or drag other tabs into it to create a new group. You can also right click a tab and then send it directly to a new group. You can rename the groups as well. You can have different groups, say, your work related windows or your social networking sites. When you click on the tab in a group, you will only see the tabs of that group on the tab bar. You will definitely appreciate the ability to give out thumbnail previews of the open tabs, which will make switching between web pages much easier.