At the end of the last month Mozilla just came out with their latest browser version of Firefox-4 and brought again in discussions the never ending war of Internet Browsers. A few days back we all have seen how the download counter of Mozilla website was running with an insane speed. But still that is not enough as the actual percentage of market share of Firefox is going down to the speed and simplicity of Google Chrome and the aggressive marketing and new features of Internet Explorer 9. Being a new competitor in the market-Google Chrome is catching up Firefox very fast and to stop it they brought a huge change in the last version of their famous browser.
The first thing on the list of changes in the Firefox 4 will have to be its UI and the chrome-ish look. Similar to the most of the competitors, Firefox has also changed their browser appearance and kept the tabs on top of their browser window instead of the menu bar. If you are a lover of the older version, but still want the new features, you can easily change it back to the look of your old Firefox browser with only 3 clicks.
The Awesome bar is also a major improvement in the Firefox 4. It is something similar to the Omnibar of Chrome but it works in a different way. The highly efficient auto-complete will help you from history, bookmarks or even page contents to type your URL.
The menu bar has been replaced by a small nice Firefox button clicking which will provide you a two rowed menu containing all the options of the menu bar. If you want to have a comparison you can do it easily by switching the style to the old one.
Another visible feature in the new Firefox is the ‘Apps Tabs’ feature. It is similar to the pinned tabs of Google Chrome. You will have to right click on a tab and select ‘Pin as App Tab’. Then the tab will get smaller and it will move to the left of the unpinned tabs. Therefore you can keep it open always but it will not be interrupting your browsing by being in the middle of the tabs.
There is another new feature in this new version of Firefox and this is the Panorama one which will let you work easily with huge number of tabs like more than 100. With this features you will be able to group your tabs and manage them with a number of options. This feature still has some glitches and complexities, but we can expect that these will be fixed with some updates.
Another long awaiting change in the Firefox 4 is the Add-Ons installation system. Till the previous version, it had a disturbing system of restarting the browser after installing any Add-On. At last Mozilla has released you of this trouble and now you can try any new Add-on without restarting your browser. That is the best thing Firefox has done in this browser as they are emphasizing a lot on their Add-Ons collection in their campaigning.
After all these new features the new browsers’ judgment comes to the point of speed. Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 is six times faster than the previous versions and in comparison to the latest versions of other browsers, Firefox is not slower to any of those. Mozilla has announced a good number of updates this year and according to some news sources Firefox 5 is one the way too!
