Flaunt new theme, Tabs on top, Speed bumps

Mozilla has released the first candidate build for its Firefox 4 browser beta, with the latest version slated for an official launch in November later this year.

If you cannot wait that long, then you can check out the latest developer build of the all-new Firefox here.

You can see those slides over on Mozilla's Mike Beltzner's blog, the director of Firefox at Mozilla. Beltzner promises that Firefox 4 will be 'super-duper' fast, support the next generation HTML5, bring touchscreen and 64-bit support, and offer a completely revamped user interface.

Tabs move up top

Indeed, the first major change in the user interface (UI) that you will notice on downloading the Firefox 4 beta is the fact that the default position of tabs is now at the top of the screen. It immediately makes the browser look a lot less cluttered. Mozilla has clearly taken a leaf out of Opera and Google Chrome's design guides.

Firefox 4 will also debut JaegerMonkey, an extension to Mozilla's JavaScript engine that works alongside TraceMonkey, which will enable a notable bump in the browser's speed.

Firefox 4 will represent a major overhaul of the browser; a step change by Mozilla in response to rival browsers' improvements.

Fluid plans

The slides, which appeared on Mozilla's Mike Beltzner's blog, indicate some of the improvements, as well as an early timeline – which could of course be subject to change.

"Please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change," blogs Beltzner - who is director of Firefox at Mozilla.

"As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets.

"We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it's ready."

Improvements

Mozilla indicates that Firefox 4 will be 'super-duper' fast, support the next generation HTML5, bring touchscreen and 64-bit support, offer a completely revamped user interface, hot swappable add ins, better stability and 'empower' users to take control of their data and web experience.

Of course, many of those improvements are to be expected from any major browser release. Speed remains a key factor as the browser is asked to do increasingly complex operations, and support for HTML5 represents the next great wave of internet standards.

If you need any further convincing to go and check out the new Firefox 4 beta, then you might also want to check out the demonstration video posted earlier this week by Mozilla's Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer on Firefox, explaining why tabs on top is now the default look for Firefox in Firefox 4.

And if that still doesn't convince you that tabs-on-top is the future of your Firefox browser experience, then you can always choose to revert back to the old school tabs-below-the-URL-bar look.