FireFox 4!

Released only 24 hours ago and already at close to 7 million downloads, the new FireFox is awesome! Want to track the FireFox downloads? Well they created this sweet little site to track FF’s awesomeness: glow.mozilla.org. Needless to say FireFox’s first 24 hours blew IE9’s out of the water, with IE coming in at under 3 million downloads (and those 2.4 million people should be found and flogged, just kidding) :-P And needless to say, everyone should go out and download the new FireFox right now!

It is pretty amazing to see the trends though. It seems like there is very intense FF download in Europe, with them leading the pack, North America coming in at a not that close second and Asia right behind that.

So what is with all the hype?

Well, I think that FireFox added some pretty sweet features and is really a step up from the 3.6 release! Of course the folks at Mozilla implemented some cosmetic changes to improve the overall browsing experience. They moved the tabs above the URL bar, joined the stop and refresh button (much like Safari), and polished up a few other UI details.

What is much cooler in my mind are some of the new bells and whistles like this new Panorama feature. This feature allows you to manage your tabs if you are a tabber like myself. By hitting command E you can jump in and out of a thumbnail preview of all the tabs that you have open. You can then organize these tabs into groups and/or shift around the tab order. Along these line you can also “pin” a tab if that page is one that you know that you frequent/dont want to close. By pinning a tab it secures it to the left side of your tabs and makes it take up less space (only displaying the tab’s favicon), pretty sweet!

Beyond the browser “bling”, the new FireFox has greatly improved in terms of performance. Compared to FF 3.6, FF 4.0 is roughly 3 times faster. Faster loading and faster running! The improvements stretch beyond speed to also account for the rapidly changing world of web technology. Now fully HTML 5 and CSS 3 ready, FireFox is a wonderful sandbox for web designers and developers. Don’t take my word for it check out some of the wicked projects that other developers have done with the technologies available thanks to FireFox 4 (of course you may need FF 4 to properly view these :-P): demos.mozilla.org/en-US/. In particular I really love this one: The Letter-HEADS. Pretty amazing!

Takeaway message: Download FireFox 4! :-P

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