Mozilla was supposed to release the final version of Firefox 4.0 today, but yesterday it appeared at the official website. Following Microsoft’s launch of IE9 and Google’s release of Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0 has now entered the market bringing GPU acceleration and a fresh interface.
Firefox 4.0 builds on a new javascript engine called Jägermonkey that will make the browser up to six times faster than the precursor, but the performance boosts are not the only thing that interests us. Mozilla has retailored the interface substantially where the goal was to minimize dead space. The meny system is gon and you now find all settings anf functions under the Firefox button in the upper left corner.
Firefox 4.0 also handles tabs differently, both through permanent tabs through “pin as app tab” for favorites, but also grouping of tabs with panorama.
As it should Firefox comes with supports for the latest web standards including HTML5, WebGL and its technology for synchronizing bookmarks and settings between computers, smartphones and other products sporting Firefox.
The browser has, just like Internet Explorer 9, full GPU acceleration of video, text and images, which seems to be working better than Microsoft’s version in our tests, though this is most likely highly system dependent.
An interesting walkthrough of some of the new functions can be found in the video below.
