At first I was amazed and awed by Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. When it was first introduced back in 2004 it was very fast and pretty powerful. But after five years of using Firefox, it became old. It was getting bogged down and it frankly wasn’t as fast as Safari or Chrome in my experience.

Firefox 4 brings a lot of great new stuff to the table. It’s incredibly quick, due to new accelerated hardware support and the UI has been polished and simplified. It also comes with support for HTML5/WebM video. Allowing you to enjoy  open HD quality video natively inside of Firefox. Improved crash protection also protects you from misbehaving plugins that usually crash the whole app, now only the plugin is affected, leaving you other work intact.

Other new features include:

• WebGL – web standard that provides a 3D graphics API implemented in a web browser without the use of plug-ins
• WebSockets - a technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels (Makes page loading faster)
• Web Console –  web-based application that allows remote users to execute UNIX/Windows shell commands on a server, upload/download files to/from server, edit text files directly on a server, etc

You can find all the new features over at Firefox’s Beta 4 page.