Mozilla missed the release date of Firefox 4 Beta 2, but is expected to publish the official download early next week. The new beta will offer a few new features, including AppTabs, which will enable sticky tabs that cannot be accidentally closed. Further out, Mozilla has posted a first version of a pre-release of Beta 3 with Tab Candy, Mozilla’s idea how to organize and group open tabs.
Beta 2 was due for release on Thursday or Friday, but has been delayed apparently due to two bugs that were discovered after the code freeze on Monday, July 19. When it becomes available Firefox 4 Beta 2 will come with some new features, most notably tabs-on-top on Mac, CSS transitions, retained layers, a change in the context menu and AppTabs.
AppTabs enable users to define tabs via a right mouse click as an AppTab, which are reduced to the width of the site logo and are placed on the very left of the tab bar. They work just like regular tabs, but as long as they are AppTabs, they cannot be closed. If you are among those who usually have a myriad of open tabs, this is a way to protect yourself from accidentally closing certain tabs.
Firefox 4 AppTabs
The context menu has also received a slight change. When right clicking a link, the top option is now “open link in a new tab”.
Mozilla says it has now its retained layers working in beta 2 as well. Retained layers affect complex graphics in web pages, which enables Firefox to cache, for example, objects with partial opacity in a separate graphics layer. Every time that object is requested, it can be displayed through the cached layer and different values of opacity without the need of re-rendering the object in the browser. Mozilla says there will be immediate speedups noticeable, but the true benefit may be seen only in very complex graphics and in combination with the use of GPU hardware acceleration, which means that this is a technology platform Mozilla can build on.
We were not able to detect any JavaScript performance improvement in the candidate builds of Firefox Beta 2 or the pre-releases of Firefox 4 Beta 3. On our test system, Firefox 4 is still scoring about 850 points in Google’s V8 benchmark and about 650 ms in Sunspider.
Firefox 4b3-pre: Tab Candy Edition
The Mozilla nightly builds already are hinting to changes for Beta 3. Firefox developer Aza Raskin has posted a pre-release version of Firefox 4 which includes a very early version of Tab Candy. Tab Candy is far from being final and is not expected to make it into Firefox anytime soon. But for those who are interested, it is an interesting way to see how Mozilla envisions the tabs feature to evolve.
Firefox Tab Candy
Tab Candy is activated via a small button next to the URL bar and shows windows with all open tabs. Users can then freely drag and drop previews of their open tabs in a new window and organize them into groups. Mozilla refers to that procedure as “lightweight grouping”, as related tabs can be attached to each other. You can even give groups of tabs their own names.
At first sight, this way to browse is substantially different than browsing from a stationary browser window. But once you get used to it, especially if you tend to work with a similar set of web pages every day, this is an innovative way to make your way of web browsing more efficient. Consider it a mix out of tab and bookmark browsing.
Firefox 3.6.8
If you don’t try the beta versions of Firefox 4, then we do recommend updating your regular Firefox 3.6.x to version 3.6.8 which is now available with another security patch that was rolled out just in time for the hacker conference Blackhat in Las Vegas.
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