Finally all the long and hard work on the fourth and biggest release yet has payed off! Mozilla has released Firefox 4, a new contender in the war with Internet Explorer and Chrome.

Feeling like hearing that Duke Nukem Forever finally gets released this year, Firefox 4.0 offers a very big leap in progress over the Firefox 3.x series. But the competition hasn't waited for Mozilla to catch up, the current browser war will be a hard one, and it will be interesting to see if Firefox 4.0 is enough to remain strong.

The first thing you'll be greeted with is the new look. Firefox 4 has a much different and better look that its predecessor, fitting nicely with the glass theme in Windows Vista and 7, while polishing it to look good on Mac too. Tabs have moved to the tab (you can still disable this feature), following the idea what Chrome and Opera have started. The menu bar is gone (with an option to re-enable it), instead giving a two tear menu in the top left under the orange Firefox button. Yeah it looks a lot like Opera's. Another bar missing in action is the status bar, which now, similar to Chrome, pop-ups in the bottom if necessary.

But of course there is more. The rendering engine has received much love from the Mozilla developers, bringing it to the present future with more standards support. The JavaScript engine has also been greatly optimized to be fast and ready to compare with the likes of V8. New is also hardware acceleration, which per platform improves rendering of web sites as well as elements like video and canvas. WebGL support, which is a JavaScript wrapper around OpenGL ES, may have a future a new way of using accelerated 3D graphics in your web browser.

When these superficial and internal changes aren't enough there are new features present as well, like Firefox sync, which can synchronize bookmarks, but also preferences and passwords in the cloud with a secure connection. A new way of handling tabs has also been added, you can now for groups of tabs that stick together. And of course you can now also pin tabs as web apps in your browser, which secures them from being closed accidentally and stick nicely on the left side.

There's a whole lot more in this release and Firefox 4 certainly is a good web browser. It can't but be noticed that the release is inspired mainly by Chrome, but what the heck, it's a war out there and it's never a bad thing to copy great ideas. All Firefox users should install this release, and of course persuade some extension developers to release their add-ons. Let's enjoy this great release!