Mozilla is a typical open source software developing organization; they keep their heads down and work hard on bringing out great new things for their users without any fuss, and of course free! The company behind world's fastest growing and currently the second most used internet browser, the Mozilla Firefox just released the latest Beta of their infamous browser for Mac Users. The Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 for Mac OS X is built on top of the company's new Gecko 2.0 layout engine.

The Beta 1, weighing in at 20.2MB introduces the crash protection feature for users to continue their browsing sessions in case there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins for Firefox. The Beta also introduces a new Add-ons manager along with several other features such as WebSockets support, a new HTML 5 parser, a Web Console analysis tool, native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format. Firefox 4.0 Beta also brings with it fast page rendering thanks to the lazy frame construction.

The Beta version also brings scores of visual changes to please the eye candy of the Mac users, with stop and reload buttons unified into a single one, bookmarks bar being entirely replaced by bookmarks button and placing tabs at the very top of the browser window in a newly designed UI theme. The Mozilla team is working hard to bring the Mac theme to Firefox which will give users the ability to put tab bars on top in OSX.

The Beta 1 is a great upgrade which brings the needed features to Firefox for Mac users. Going further into the beta, Mozilla promises to bring more improvements such as advanced privacy controls, hardware graphics acceleration, JavaScript performance optimizations, and the ability to synchronize settings, passwords, bookmarks, history, open tabs and other customizations across multiple devices at the same time.

Post from: Sizzled Core

Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 Released