Mozilla today launched a “new” Firefox 4 Beta, which is internally called Firefox 4 Beta 4. The new version features the Sync feature, Tab Candy, which is now called Panorama is faster once again and seems to be using a new version of the Gecko layout engine.

Mozilla’s beta process is progressing almost on schedule and brought Tab Candy in record time to the browser. It has been one of the features we did not expect, but could help Mozilla to give Firefox a unique identity again. Rather than having to deal with a mess of tabs in the tab bar, Panorama allows users to visually organize tabs and sort them into groups. If you are often working with many tabs, this is a great way to stay organized. Compared to book mark folders, Panorama is a much faster way to browse a certain set of web sites.

Sync arrives with a substantial delay, but Firefox now enables users to synchronize certain data such as book marks or browsing history online in order to make those data sets available to any Firefox browser that accesses the web via the same account.

In a first test run, we noticed that Firefox 4 Beta 4 is faster than its predecessor and is now completing the Sunspider test in 557 ms. In comparison, that is about 40% faster than Firefox 3.6.8. Still, Firefox 4 is still a good distance away from the 400 ms target, which should be achieved with the new JaegerMonkey Javascript engine, which is currently completing the Sunspider test in 476 ms. We expect JaegerMonkey to join Firefox 4 in the beta 5 phase.

There are some signs that Mozilla has also built the new Gecko 2.0 layout engine into the Beta 4, which should deliver a range of performance and rendering improvements. However, Mozilla has not released any information relating to Gecko 2.0 yet. You can download the latest beta from Mozilla’s website.

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