Firefox 4 Beta 1 available

Mozilla has release their first beta of Firefox 4  which includes updates such as the Gecko 2.0 engine, tabs on top (windows only) a new extension manager, HD HTML 5 WedDM video format support, crash protection and a new HTML5 engine. Read on for more info and the link to the download.

Release notes

• Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only – OSX and Linux will bechanging when the theme has been modified to support the change.
• On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with theFirefox button.
• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
• Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
• The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
• Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
• CSS Transitions are partially supported.
• Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
• Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
• Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
• An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
• Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
• Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page usingHTML History APIs.
• More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
• Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
• CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
• New HTML5 parser.
• Support for more HTML5 form controls.\

Download Firefox 4 Beta 1 Here!