Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 1 into the wild with an apparent emphasis on speed and support for new and emerging web standards. New features as pointed out by Wired's Web Monkey are:
- Support for WebM video
- More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
- Better page rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
- Crash protection that prevents bad plugins from blowing up the whole browser
- New add-ons manager
- Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons
Sounds great, but remember this is Beta release 1 so things are bound to be broken or at least a little unstable.
Personally, I'm a longtime Firefox user who recently made the switch to Chrome for all of my personal browsing. Speed was definitely a deciding factor. I am not so far down the Google path that Mozilla can't entice me back but I'll need to see some compelling reasons to do so. I'll give it a download and let you know my thoughts.
Also, as a teaser, tomorrow marks one month of using the iPad for me and I hope to put together my thoughts in a post later this week, so stay tuned.
