Unless you’ve been living under a giant rock for the past - well - few years, you should know that Firefox 4.0 is coming. A major new version of Mozilla’s browser with redesigned interface, new addon manager, new engine, lots of improvements and tweaks. Mozilla die-hard fans look at it as the ultimate program coming to a computer near them. We Mac users just think about how Mozilla badly screwed up with the UI on OS X in the past and wait with curious eyes for some stable version to actually ship.
Now, we have a nightly version (as usual, it’s dubbed Minefield) with the much-discussed tabs-on-top available for testing. You can also download a 64-bit enabled build for Snow Leopard.
So, how about these tabs?
Let me tell you this: I love tabs on top. It just makes more sense to me: you have more space to navigate, tabs are located in the otherwise useless top bar, webpages are one thing with the address bar. I don’t know, I just happen to like them. And remember Safari 4 Beta, the one with tabs-on-top? I loved them. Then they were gone.
Anyway, Mozilla’s implementation is simple: you can choose to activate them or not. They are enabled by default, but you can just right click and go back to normal tabs behavior. The interface design is quite pleasant. So are animations and dragging between tabs.
Should we trust Mozilla for this? That maybe they’ll release a decent version of Firefox for Mac OS X?
I think I will. Go download the latest Firefox 4 nightly version for Mac here.
