We at NPI would like to extend our heart­felt con­grat­u­la­tions to the team at Mozil­la, who released Fire­fox 4 this morn­ing after labor­ing for many weeks and months to devel­op this lat­est and great­est ver­sion of the world’s best web browser.

This is a huge accomplishment.

Hav­ing tried out the betas and the release can­di­date, I can attest that a lot of thought went into this release. There’s a ton of new fea­tures, but per­haps the most wel­come improve­ments are under the hood. Fire­fox 4 is sim­ply faster, smoother, and more respon­sive. Like Inter­net Explor­er 9, it takes advan­tage of hard­ware accel­er­a­tion, shift­ing some of the work of ren­der­ing web pages to the graph­ics card (if one is installed and avail­able). How­ev­er, unlike IE9, Fire­fox 4 is avail­able to users of XP as well as Vista and 7 on the Win­dows platform.

On the more recent ver­sions of Win­dows, Fire­fox 4 does away with the menu bar, replac­ing it with an orange Fire­fox but­ton. I’m of the opin­ion that this but­ton actu­al­ly makes access­ing the browser’s con­trols much eas­i­er, because there’s only one place to click, and all of the most impor­tant stuff is right there.

Addi­tion­al con­trols are avail­able through fly­out menus when you mouse over an item that has a car­rot next to it. The menu bar remains avail­able, how­ev­er, for those who don’t like the change.

On Win­dows 7, Fire­fox 4 also sup­ports tab pre­views from the taskbar, which is real­ly nifty. And on both Vista and 7, it now sup­ports Microsoft­’s Aero desk­top envi­ron­ment, which makes it look like a native Microsoft application.

New fea­tures include app tabs and Fire­fox Panora­ma. App tabs are basi­cal­ly pinned tabs that always show up on the far left end of the tab bar.

If you’re a pow­er user like me, and keep a lot of tabs open, hav­ing app tabs is huge, because you can pin com­mon­ly used web pages there and go back to them with­out hav­ing to scroll through a list of open tabs.

Fire­fox Panora­ma, pre­vi­ous­ly known as Tab Can­dy, is a way to orga­nize and sort tabs. You can access it using the Panora­ma but­ton that should appear in the upper-right cor­ner (the but­ton has sev­er­al mul­ti­col­ored blocks, and hov­er­ing over it should pro­duce a tooltip say­ing, Group your tabs). You can also access Panora­ma by hit­ting Ctrl + Shift + E. Enter­ing Panora­ma, you’ll see a visu­al depic­tion of all the tabs you cur­rent­ly have open. You can cre­ate new tab groups by click­ing in the emp­ty space and drag­ging your cur­sor to draw a new box.

(Don’t see the Panora­ma but­ton? I did­n’t when I upgrad­ed to Fire­fox 4. You can man­u­al­ly insert the Panora­ma but­ton by open­ing Tool­bar Lay­out, how­ev­er. Drag it next to the Home but­ton if it’s missing).

Tab groups are use­ful if you’re try­ing to sep­a­rate your activ­i­ties. For instance, if you’re doing mul­ti­ple research projects, each project can have its own tab group. Panora­ma takes some get­ting used to, and the Mozil­la team will undoubt­ed­ly be deliv­er­ing usabil­i­ty improve­ments in future ver­sions, but it’s a handy feature.

Fire­fox 4 also elim­i­nates the sta­tus bar, though sta­tus mes­sages still appear in the low­er left cor­ner, a la Chromi­um. When a web page fin­ish­es load­ing, no mes­sage is dis­played. Since many add-ons placed icons in the sta­tus bar in pre­vi­ous Fire­fox ver­sions, Mozil­la has cre­at­ed an Add-ons bar to replace the sta­tus bar. This is not dis­played by default, but it can be acti­vat­ed by click­ing on the Fire­fox but­ton, hov­er­ing over options, and then click­ing Add-ons bar.

There are also a bunch of small but excel­lent enhance­ments that aren’t appar­ent until you use them. For instance, when past­ing a URL into the address bar, you can now choose “Paste and Go” instead of just paste. This elim­i­nates the need for an extra click, or the need to strike the Enter key.

Most of the best add-ons are already com­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 4. When you upgrade, most of your add-ons will just con­tin­ue work­ing. How­ev­er, some might be dis­abled, like Lazarus Form Recov­ery or ref­spoof. I sus­pect that it won’t be long before such add-ons are updat­ed to work with Fire­fox 4.

Speak­ing of add-ons, they’re now man­aged in their own tab instead of in a sep­a­rate win­dow. The new default is for add-ons to update auto­mat­i­cal­ly, although you can spec­i­fy that you want to be in charge if you like.

Users of Ubun­tu and Kubun­tu will get Fire­fox 4 in about a month when Nat­ty Nar­whal, the next ver­sion of the world’s most pop­u­lar GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion, is released. Nat­ty is cur­rent­ly in alpha and will be enter­ing beta in a few weeks. It is (of course!) pos­si­ble to add Fire­fox 4 to Mav­er­ick Meerkat or Lucid Lynx, but there’s no harm in wait­ing for Nat­ty to be released, since it’s already on its way. By that time, more add-ons will prob­a­bly be com­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 4 anyway.

Win­dows and Mac users can upgrade now by going to Help > Check for updates.

Final­ly, as usu­al, Mozil­la has again improved sup­port for web stan­dards. Fire­fox 4 is HTML5 ready and also sup­ports much of CSS3 (which is not yet finalized).

Again, con­grat­u­la­tions to Mozil­la on ship­ping this release. Fire­fox 4 is sim­ply a ter­rif­ic brows­er. It looks great, it’s rock sol­id, and it’s infi­nite­ly cus­tomiz­able. It real­ly does put the user in the dri­ver’s seat.