Hands on: Firefox 4

Mozilla has picked up the pace with the latest version of the Firefox browser.

As the browser battlefront begins to heat up, Mozilla is shooting a specced-up Firefox 4 into the mix. Long popular with the power user community by virtue of its sheer customisability, the latest version of Firefox, version 4, has hit Jenny Craig's and now sports a bare bones interface, synchronisation, as well as a shot in the arm for speed. So the big question is the Fox foxy enough take on Chrome and IE9?

One of the biggest downsides with previous versions of Firefox has been its slow to start up times WebPage rendering. Mozilla have taken this to heart, and thankfully one of the most significant improvements with Firefox 4 is speed. JavaScript performance is smoking thanks to the bizarrely branded Jägermonkey JavaScript engine, start-up times have also been tweaked, and graphics heavy pages have also been given the digital equivalent of Viagra with Mozilla claiming that Firefox 4 is three to six times faster than earlier versions. This was certainly borne out in real world use, with Firefox 4 feeling responsive and ultra-zippy.

Interface

Speed aside, Mozilla has also remodelled Firefox's look and feel. The most noticeable tweak is the new Firefox button situated in the browser's upper left corner. Hitting it brings up a new Firefox menu and greatly reduces on-screen clutter. Mozilla has also crammed more into less as the rest of Firefox's interface has been trimmed down to free up more web-page real-estate. Tabs are now on the top of the screen and the reload/stop buttons are now in the address bar, making for a far cleaner and more intuitive browser layout.

Tabs

With tabbed browsing now an indispensible part of any digital junkie's surfing repertoire, Firefox's tabbed surf savvy has increased significantly. Hitting a small button on the top right of the Firefox window fires up the Tab Panorama view which is a lot like the Apple's OSX Expose feature. Existing tabs are displayed as small thumbnails which can be dragged and dropped into customisable groups so managing tabs becomes far easier. Tabs can now also be pinned to the left side of your tab bar which is great for quick and handy access to websites you tend to visit frequently.

Sync

With Firefox now also available for a multitude of smartphones, the new Sync feature is also incredibly handy. Passwords, bookmarks, browsing histories and preferences can all be synced to Firefox on Android and iOS smartphones. Sync also works with PCs on the same LAN (local area network), so reinstalling Firefox across multiple PCs becomes a whole lot easier

Expandability and other bits

Last but by no means least, a lot of other less visible improvements have been made under Firefox's hood. There is now support for HTML5 and a bunch of other fancy-pants web formats such as CSS3.

As with IE9, Firefox supports hardware accelerated graphics, offloading webpage graphic rendering to your PC's graphics hardware to make graphics-heavy websites run a whole lot smoother.

Plugins have long been one of the key drivers of Firefox's popularity, extending just how customisable it is. Mozilla has also added some spit and polish to these by sandboxing plugins for crash protection so badly behaved plugins won't take your entire browser out.

Verdict

I've long been a big Firefox fan, and are pretty impressed by Firefox 4. its slick new interface layout and zippy performance combines with acres of third party developer support and bazillions of plugins to make Firefox 4 a definite candidate for anyone's desktop.

Firefox 4 can be found here.