First Firefox 4 Beta Now Available for Download

Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for download. While this release is considered “stable and safe to use for daily web browsing,” there’s still a ways to go before a final release of Firefox 4.0: Every two to three weeks, there’ll be a new beta version released incorporating the feedback from the last wave.

What’s new in Firefox 4?

Maybe most importantly, crash protection: Firefox is a notoriously crashy browser, and Mozilla’s blog post touts that in Firefox 4, you’ll be able to “experience uninterrupted browsing (now available on all platforms) – when a plugin crashes or freezes, you can resume browsing by simply refreshing the page.” Crash protection is currently available for Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight on Windows and Linux computers; no Mac release yet.

Mozilla also claims that there’ll be an uptick in performance when you start the browser and load pages, though they note that there’s more work to be done in that department. Other features include new privacy fixes, high-definition HTML5 video using WebM, and, most visibly, a new user interface and add-on manager, the latter of which isn’t yet fully built.

You can download Firefox 4 Beta 1 here.

(Mozilla)

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Robert Quigley