There is quite a bit of browser news out there today. Firefox 4 is officially released, Opera discontinues Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.x, and Chrome gets a developer update, as well as multitab support.

Of course, the big news today is the final release of Firefox 4, which we have detailed yesterday already. There has been some confusion about what is Firefox 4 and what not, especially since Mozilla noted yesterday - after the Firefox 4 download had leaked -  that the posted Firefox 4 isn’t really Firefox 4. This was rather strange, especially since Mozilla had said before numerous times that Firefox 4 RC2 was the final release.  Traditionally, Mozilla just does not like it if those browsers are downloaded before the initial announcement, just in case there are some last-second changes necessary. In this case, however, yesterday’s Firefox 4 is today’s Firefox 4.

We have listed the release history in an article yesterday. Here are the noteworthy changes over version 3.6:

 

- A new user interface
- Hardware acceleration support (GPU, multi-core CPU)
- A faster JavaScript engine (JaegerMonkey)
- Panorama graphical tab interface
- A new add-on manager (Firefox 4 requires new versions of add-ons)
- Firefox Sync
- Pinned tabs
- Improved HTML5 support
- WebGL support
- WebM support
- Open Type Font support
- SVG support
- Multi-touch support for Windows 7
- Do-not-track
- Out of process plug-ins

You can download the new Firefox 4 here.

In other news, Opera decided to discontinue Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile (6). There will be no Opera 11 for Microsoft aging platform, while the company released Opera Mobile 11 for Android and Symbian. Opera justified its move with the fact that there have been no new Windows Mobile devices in quite some time and the market share of the platform is falling. There has been no decision whether Windows Phone 7 will see Opera Mobile. It’s not a business case for the company yet, Opera said.

Google is busy as well and released a patched version of Chrome 11 Dev, which now stands at 11.0.696.16. The nightly builds of Chromium 12 will soon receive an interesting new feature that may improve the handling of tabs. According to a developer post, the user will be able to choose shift/click, ctrl/click and shift/ctrl/click to select multiple tabs and use the context menu options, close, or move multiple tabs.

The guys over at Google Operating System added to our previous post that revealed the touch UI for Chrome with a post that links to the developer explanation and publishes an interesting note that was found in one of Chrome’s JS files that relate to the touch UI:

@fileoverview NTP Standalone hack

This file contains the code necessary to make the Touch NTP work as a stand-alone application (as opposed to being embedded into chrome). This is useful for rapid development and testing, but does not actually form part of the product.

Note that, while the product portion of the touch NTP is designed to work just in the latest version of Chrome, this hack attempts to add some support for working in older browsers to enable testing and demonstration on existing tablet platforms. In particular, this code has been tested to work on Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2. The goal is that the need to support any other browser should not leak out of this file - and so we will hack global JS objects as necessary here to present the illusion of running on the latest version of Chrome.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.