After interminable delays, Firefox 4 has finally been released with a slew of new features, but can the original alternative browser powerhouse catch up with IE9 and Chrome 10?
For the historians and browser-curious among you, there's an interesting pictorial saga online at
The Atlantic which shows the visual development of Internet Explorer from versions 1 through 9. (Admittedly, there's a few of these compilations lurking around the net, but it was The Atlantic's that popped up in our RSS the other day.)
Whilst viewing it this week, we couldn't help but notice the staggering five years (plus) of development time Microsoft took in between deploying IEs 6 and 7. Yep, a whole half-decade and more of tweaking took place in the leadup to IE7's refresh. These days, such an elongated delay for a major browser would seemingly be unthinkable, but that's not to say postponements don't occur.
The new-look Firefox 4 on Windows.
After all, Firefox 3 was released in June 2008, which is now nearly three years ago (although substantial incremental updates with versions 3.5 and 3.6 have taken place in that time). And since 3.0 hit, we've seen launches for IE 8 and 9, Safari 4 and 5, and the hugely significant introduction of Google's Chrome, which is already in double digits version-wise.
Firefox 4's "Awesome Bar" helps search with remembered context from your history, bookmarks and tabs.
(To be fair, all these browsers undergo differing development cycles, and their nominal version numbers represent different and individual scales of achievement.) But there's no denying the widespread view that Firefox's speed, innovations and uniqueness have been overtaken in recent times by Chrome and Internet Explorer's impressive (and more frequent) updates and evolutions.
App Tabs give you a fixed location for popular sites, like webmail or social networking.
And given that it was that initial five-year Microsoft delay between IEs 6 and 7 that helped enable Firefox's very ascension in the first place, it would be an ironic result indeed if Mozilla's tardiness prior to releasing Firefox 4 this week proved to be the straw that broke this browser's back. Of course, Firefox still has a healthy lead on Chrome in terms of market share (as IE does on Firefox), but one wonders how many of the millions of Chrome users out there were former Firefox devotees who simply got sick of waiting for their pages to load and were keen to try something new.
Bolstering Mozilla's hopes are the impressive download figures Firefox 4 has already garnered this week. Within 24 hours of having been launched, Firefox 4 had already been downloaded 7.1 million times; compare this against IE9's 2.35 million downloads within its first 24 hours and you can see, delay or no delay, there's still huge user demand for the new Mozilla browser (the total downloads figure now stands at over 22 million and counting).
Switch to Tab prevents you from loading duplicate pages if the site is already open.
Firefox 4 is available
here. The new release features greatly improved start-up and page-load times, a revamped interface with new tab functionalities, new syncing abilities for passwords and bookmarks, plus enhanced security and privacy functions, and a whole heap more. And there's still support for more than 200,000 add-ons for those who like to customise or beef up their browsing experience. You can read more about the new features
here.