Beta Max

Ars Technica reports: Mozilla has announced the availability of the second Firefox 4 beta. This prerelease introduces several new features and brings further refinement to the open source Web browser's new user interface.

We took a close look at Firefox's visual refresh when we tested the first beta earlier this month. The tabs have been moved to the top, above the main toolbar and URL text box. The menubar is gone, replaced with a single menu button that is embedded in the top corner of the window. These changes move Firefox into conformance with the prevailing user interface paradigms that are already used by Opera and Google's Chrome.

One of the major user interface additions in beta 2 is support for "application" tabs. When you convert a regular tab into an app tab by selecting the relevant option from the right-click context menu, the tab will shrink down to just the icon and move to the far left-hand side of the tab bar. When the implementation is complete, the app tabs will eventually persist across sessions. The idea seems similar to the tab-pinning feature that is available in Chrome.

Mozilla is planning to institute a more radical overhaul of tab management and overflow handling, as the organization demonstrated in its recent Tab Candy prototype. You can look forward to reading our full hands-on report about Tab Candy in the near future.

Mozilla is also working to improve the browser's rendering, scrolling and startup performance, and handling of emerging Web standards. CSS3 transitions and transformations are supported in the new beta. Users who want to test the new beta can download it from the Mozilla website. For more details, you can refer to the official Mozilla blog.