Mozilla Firefox 4

It's been a forthnight since Firefox 4 released.The first major upgrade to Mozilla Firefox since July 17^th 2008 when Firefox 3 was released. Firefox 4 has had about 69,404,093 download at the time of writing this blog(you can check the latest count from http://glow.mozilla.org/). This article provides you a peek into the various feature that the browser has to offer.

1. The UI has changed a lot.As can be seen from the pic below, the firefox toolbar has been shrunk.You can see a single Firefox button at the top left of your screen.The tool bar blends smoothly with Windows 7.

2. Firefox Panorama: This is a brand new feature brought in by Mozilla. It displays a very different approach towards tabs.The button which can be seen in the pic below provides an entry into the Panorama view of Firefox.You can assimilate similar tabs into one box and even size the boxes as per its priority and importance.
   
   
   

3. App Tab: This one is another feature dedicated to tabs. Using this feature you can pin various tabs the toolbar.The app tab feature disallows accidental closing of the tab.Also the tabs are retained when you restart the browser.This feature comes in handy for sites like gmail,faceook,twitter ,etc.and if you get a new mail or somebody pings you, the app tab turns blue indicating the event.

4. There have been other changes to Tabs ,which include their location on the screen and the 'switch to Tab' feature.
5. Hardware accelreation: This is proving out to be the major feature with respect to the competition between the browsers.IE has it,now Firefox also boasts with this feature.Hardware acceleration is a feature which aims at the smoothening animation and rendering webpages much faster.This is done by handing over processor intensive task to the Graphic processing unit. The edge that firefox has over IE is that its harware acceleration is supported by Mac OS and Linux too.
6. A new javascript renderer which goes by the name of 'JagerMonkey' has made Firefox's Java Script handling even better.
7. Full HTML 5 Support.

These new features seem to have rejuvenated Firefox, whose second place position was being threatened by the emergence of Chrome.This browser wars only seem to intensify with Chrome's aggressive update cycles.

As of now Internet Explorer has about 44%, Mozilla Firefox has about 29% while Chrome has around 14% of the total browser market share.