14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4.0 has been finalized and the bits are now available for download to all users, despite the fact that Mozilla has yet to announce the launch of the next generation of its open source browser. Firefox 4.0 Final is now live on the browser vendor’s FTP servers, and will probably be announced officially either later today or tomorrow, March 22nd, 2011, as initially planned.
However, users don’t really have to wait any longer for the browser, especially considering that many had their hopes up that version 4.0 would be released sometime in October or November 2010.
Delayed a few months due mainly to the volume of bugs Mozilla needed to deal with, Firefox 4.0 went through no less than 12 Beta development milestones, and two Release Candidate Builds, the last of which just this past weekend.
Firefox 4.0 brings to the table a variety of new features and enhancements compared to the previous version of the open source browser.
Make sure to watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article for an overview of Firefox 4.0’s consistent evolution.
With Firefox 4.0, Mozilla overhauled the graphical user interface dramatically, taking the new UI in a new direction in terms of design when compared to version 3.6 and earlier.
Personally, I love the new streamlined UI, but I have been hearing quite a lot of criticism from Firefox users about the revamping.
In addition, Firefox 4.0 makes it easier for users to synchronize content over various devices, to manage add-on and Tabs.
Version 4.0 also delivers a massive improvement in terms of performance, with the usual focus on JavaScript.
Of course, there are more improvements, including hardware acceleration, crash protection, privacy enhancements, multi-touch support, etc.
In terms of modern web standards support, Firefox 4.0 is one of the most compliant browsers out there, designed by default to play nice with HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebM, and others.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Mac is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.15 and Firefox 3.5.17 for Windows are available for download here.
