As competition between browsers gets more and more intense, it is ultimately the user who gets to win … and the recent beta version of firefox 4 confirms that yet again.

Mozilla has made several radical changes to the user-interface, many of them modelled after google’s browser chrome. Tab bar has been shifted to the top and a minimal drop down button has been added to top-left corner – probably inspired by the recent user-interface changes made by opera browser. All in all the user-interface now seems to be a  lot more sleeker and spares more space for the web-content.

Apart from the glossy looks, Firefox 4 has a plethora of features to offer.  The new interface features a very handy tab grouping facility, which enables users to group together and hence better manage tabs. Also tab iconification has now been integrated into the interface. While these features were previously attainable through the use of add-ons, having them as an integral part of the user-interface straight out of the box ensures a seamless user experience, something that add-on developers many a times fail to provide.

Another killer feature is integration of sync. Users can now sync bookmarks, open tabs and passwords without installing any additional add-on. Again although this was achievable previously through addon Mozilla weave, its a crucial feature and integrating it into the browser is a welcome move.

Apart from these there are many other enhancements like many-fold increment in speed and faster loading times. Mozilla has always been a supporter of recent advancements in html and css standards and has improved support for html 5 and css3.

Also mozilla now enables graphic acceleration (in windows) and multi-touch support, making it an even more strong competitor to internet explorer.

Now, last but not the least, we come to the probably well known feature of firefox … extensibility via add-ons. The huge community of developers continually toils to improve user-experience in innovative ways. Firefox 4 makes the work lot easier for developers with the jet-pack sdk which provides developers new and advanced means to develop add-ons which can be installed without restarting the browser.

Well, what about the addons already out there ? Unfortunately, as the firefox 4 is still very new and is still in beta phase, add-ons developers will need to catch up and update their creations for the latest version.

Download Firefox 4 beta version from here .

• Jar:File not found error in Mozilla firefox
• 6 Must Have Security Addons for firefox
• How to add incompatible add-ons to Firefox 4