| binary solo said: Didn't know it was a Beta, didn't even realise I was using 4.0 until I opened this thread and looked at the top of the window to see what version I was using and noticed the "4.0" sitting right there for the first time. Apart from it screwing with VG Chartz for a couple of days after I'd updated Java (not sure how it got fixed but VGC started working normally all of a sudden), it seems to be no different to Firefox 3.whatever. Doesn't seem to have been that big of an update to warrant a new number, but maybe it's more of an under the hood change that non-techo people like me wouldn't have a clue about. |
Quite some under-the-hood went on, indeed, as well as some UI design work. But for the end user a few new features should stand out, anyway:
- you can now choose to have tabs on top a-la-Chrome, which I always thought made more sense. A minor but nifty option is that to pin "app tabs"
- better insulation of plugins such as flash, to avoid them taking down the whole browser when they crash
- work-in-progress version of the "panorama" tab grouping UI, which is very interesting imo. See here a video by the great Aza Raskin and test it yourself
- starting in 4 beta7, the new javascript engine will bring a great speedup in javascrip-intensive web applications
- better support for html5 and css. These are more for the developers at the moment, but they allow -for example- smooth animated transitions for page elements, without flash nor javascript.
Plus, some under the hood changes make it much quicker on some complex pages I design, thus I'm gladly sticking to the beta for my day to day usage, both as a user and as a developer.
