After visiting Mozilla’s website, it looks they have released the beta version of their 4th version of Firefox. I quickly downloaded it and viola!

The new version of the well know browser, for its high quality both in security and customization, looks cool and even more snappier from previous versions. Below are some of my first impression on the new version.

Looks thinner and added new UI features

I am fond of minimalist designs so as soon as I saw the new UI firefox 4, I was amazed with how it looked. Although it still has the same components – menu bar, tabs, navigation buttons, address bar, and the search bar, the new look is stunning. I like how they made it thinner to get more screen space.

And on to that note of getting more screen space, it looks like the firefox team puts a new way of displaying the menu. After you get the menu bar removed, you will see a new Firefox bar at the left most part of the tab bar and there you can access the menu. Also, aside from this, you will get a bookmark button right beside the search bar which I think is cool. And the pie looking thing beside the web page name is new as well.

Another thing I noticed on the new UI, is that you can now re-size any textbox to your desired size just by dragging while holding your left mouse button. This I believe is new compared to previous versions of firefox. Well, I am not surprised with this feat since I first saw this used in Chrome but this is new to firefox.

Speed

Well I didn’t ran any speed test with this new version of firefox but it just feels faster. Loading of web pages loads much faster which I am only seeing in Chrome. But, hey, I am not saying it is faster than chrome. Unless someone runs a speed test and shows me that this new version of firefox is faster than Chrome, I am still putting my money on Chrome when we are talking about speed.

Well, that’s my first impression about firefox 4 and it looks promising. Probably, I will get back to firefox but not now I guess. I still like the speed and minimalist look of Chrome.

Issues

Issues I found so far is sudden  loss of my cursor and some buttons un-clickable. I have to refresh the page or close the whole browser to get it back. Aside from this, so far so good.

So, what do you think about the new Firefox 4?