Mozilla this morning officially released the first beta of its Firefox 4.0 browser to the public. No nightly build anymorecan, it’s the actual browser that is designed to bring Firefox back to the top of the crop and in line to compete with Chrome 6, Opera’s 10.x, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 – all of which have made significant progress in recent months. Firefox 4.0 will be a major step for Mozilla. This beta, however, is less than you might expect.

Mozilla has released a “big chart o’ technology” that sums up all new features, but the most apparent innovation is Firefox’ new interface. Tabs are now given more priority and are on top. If you are a fan of simplicity, you can disable the legacy menu bar and replace it with a “Firefox” button that retains access to the most important features of the browser.

Conceivably, Firefox now feels much more like Chrome 6, even if the latest developer versions of Google’s browser have dropped even more buttons and it appears that Google has started a contest in which browser manufacturers are trying to top each other in removing complexity from the browser interface. Google may be pushing the envelope a bit too far at this time and may have created a usability challenge for people who have never used a browser before, but it is clear that Chrome and Firefox are setting a trend that may reach far beyond the browser soon – and touch other application types as well.

The new Firefox Beta 1 is 9 MB in size, but will occupy 52 MB on your PC. It comes with a new Add-ons manager as well as JetPack SDK support, which enables users to install plug-ins without restarting the browser. There is also support for WebM HD video, CSS3, as well as nearly complete HTML 5 support, including audio, video and drag and drop of files (which works, for example, in Gmail when attaching files.) What is missing is support for HTML 5 forms, the full screen video API and support for the video buffer API (via CSS).

What is missing from Firefox 4 are nearly all performance enhancements that were promised by Mozilla. So far, performance enhancements are limited to your perception and the simplified interface. D2D hardware acceleration is still inactive and, what is more important, the Jaegermonkey JavaScript engine, which will replace the current Tracemonkey engine, is still in development. According to the Jaegermonkey developer team, the engine is nearing Tracemonkey performance in Sunspider (the black line counts in the shown chart) at this time, which is about 680 ms on our system. Mozilla’s stated goal is a reduction to 500 ms, which may not be enough, given the fact that IE9 is already around 500 ms, Safari is around 400 ms (on Windows), Opera around 340 ms and Chrome is around 310 ms.

Our first test run showed a fairly stable browser with no crashes. Mozilla’s own crash reporting also indicates that substantial progress has been made since the release of the first Beta 1 candidate build. There are still issues and you may want to read the release notes first before you are installing this browser. On our test system, we found the default Vista transparent theme a bit annoying as it is virtually unusable if you are running a dark desktop background. The browser windows also showed some rendering problems that occasionally did not show any content without a manual refresh.

Mozilla now has a little over 3 months to fine tune Firefox 4, if it wants to achieve its goal to launch Firefox 4 in October. We believe there is just too much left to do and too many gaps that need to be filled, which makes an October launch date rather unrealistic. November or December seem to be more likely at this point.

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