Firefox 4 Beta 1 is ready for download and test. This Beta 1 was released on July 6th 2010, Firefox announced on their blog here. This major release has a lot of improvements and new features. The most important is HTML5 and CSS3 support and this is a must for all web browsers to support this. The stable release is scheduled to be released around November this year.
The new features in Firefox 4:
- New UI: New Tab Location, Switch to tab and Firefox button.
- New Add-Ons Manager: gives you more space to manage your Add-Ons, Themes and Plugins. Customizing your browser has never been easier!
- HD Video: Watch hardware-accelerated, super-smooth, HD-quality HTML5 video on YouTube using the new WebM format.
- Privacy improvements: Mozilla always puts privacy first, and this latest beta fixes flaws in some web standards that could expose your browser history.
- Crash Protection: Experience uninterrupted browsing (now available on all platforms) — when a plugin crashes or freezes, you can resume browsing by simply refreshing the page.
- Performance: We know that performance is important. In this version, we focused on improving responsiveness at start-up and during page loads. This is just the beginning for performance improvements in Firefox 4.
See the Firefox Beta 1 release notes.
Update: Firefox 4 has been released now. Download it here.