Firefox 4 New Features

Posted on: April 7th, 2011 by 4 Comments

With the recent release of Firefox 4 many users are excited about all of the new and long awaited features. Now everyone can enjoy the new simplified interface and massive speed increases Firefox 4 has to offer.

Awesome New Features

Already users have reported the ability to have over 100 tabs open and multiple instances of YouTube playing at the same time. Also less crashing and improved security, so be sure to try out Firefox 4 today.

Firefox 4 Screenshot
 

Install Firefox 4

This is how you can install Firefox 4 on your system using the PPA, just type these commands into your terminal. 

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

The New Interface

You will find some noticeable changes with the new interface that were intended to save space. The bar used for your open tabs has now been moved to the top of your Firefox window, with the navigation bar directly below it. These changes were designed to optimize the workspace for laptops. Options are still available to switch things back to the way that you prefer. There is also a cool mini app tab bar for sites you keep open all the time. To create your app tab just right click on a tab you want and then click pin to app tab. Everything else is slightly more streamlined, and there is a bit more room for browsing.

Firefox 4 Tab Panorama

Firefox

The concept of tabbed browsing has become so popular that Firefox has finally decided to expand the idea. The tab panorama option offers a tab organization window that you can use to sort your tabs and see them as a thumbnail preview. You can also use this new feature as a type of to-do list by sorting your tabs in a priority based order. Even categorize your tabs into groups with only specified groups showing in the tab bar at any given time. To create more than one tab group in your panorama interface just drag an open tab thumbnail into the empty space around the tab group window.

Firefox Synchronization

Firefox 4 Screenshot

Now you can keep your passwords, history, bookmarks, tabs and your preferences synchronized between multiple computers with new built in features. You can also keep your information synchronized on mobile devices such as Android. These features are just some of the highlights of the new release, so if these are the features that you have been waiting for download Firefox 4 immediately because you won't be disappointed.

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  • http://www.fether.net Paula

    Hi, I have 4.0.1 on Ubuntu 11.04, but I don’t see how to get to the “panorama” view. Also, I can no longer move a tab or drag it to the desktop to open a new window, and haven’t found any help forums mentioning this problem. The system just did an update yesterday, could this have disabled some tab features? Thanks for any help.

  • http://linuxlibrary.org thinkinhurtz

    The panorama view can be toggled using the small mini tab on the far right hand side of the tab panel, it has a down arrow for a popup menu. As for the problems your are having, I doubt any features were disabled, especially because those are popular features. I suggest completely removing firefox and reinstalling those packages, using apt-get or synaptic. That may solve the problems. There is an apt-get tutorial on this site if you need assistance.

  • http://www.fether.net Paula

    Hi thinkinhurtz, thanks. It says “tab groups” and I was looking for “panorama”. And I’ll try the reinstall too.

    • http://linuxlibrary.org thinkinhurtz

      Don’t quote me on this, but I believe the tab groups and panorama features are the same, or related at least. Check out this YouTube video to see a closer look at how to use panorama and tab groups.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78hoObaDCx4