Promising to be faster and stricter with the current and upcoming web standards, as well as adding the new WebM video standard that’s been put in place by Google, Mozilla Firefox 4 is the new face of competition from the Mozilla Foundation for what will be your next version of your favorite web browser.

What’s New in Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1:

• Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only – OSX and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
• On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with the Firefox button.
• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
• Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
• The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
• Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
• CSS Transitions are partially supported.
• Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
• Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
• Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
• An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
• Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
• Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
• More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
• Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
• CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
• New HTML5 parser.
• Support for more HTML5 form controls.

Above is my screenshot from my attempt on the Mac. There are no add-ons that directly work with this beta besides Adblock Plus out of my many add-ons. It did seem to run off less RAM, seemed to be a bit faster than Firefox 3.6.6. And for that fancy looking UI upgrade, give it a try on Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7.

[ Links: Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 Release Notes ]

With Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, alongside some other more esoteric web browsers, like the Mozilla based K-Meleon [ site here ] for instance, are great and it’s finally good to have options. But for another new player to enter the market, it better do something awesome or different.

Well, enter the Lunascape browser. It features not one, not two… but three browser engines in one. Lunascape includes the rendering engines for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome/Safari all in one browser with the ability to switch between the rendering engines and use Firefox or Internet Explorer add-ons alongside the other engines.

Lunascape, the Triple Engine browser, now supports Triple Add-ons and provides you with more advanced yet easy-to-use interfaces. We consider this as an important step towards the unified browsing platform. With Lunascape, you can have all you need to interact with the Web in a single platform that is personalized just for you.

Lunascape is now compatible with the expanding array of Firefox add-ons in addition to the already supported Internet Explorer add-ons and Lunascape plug-ins. Transferring your add-ons from Firefox 3.5 is very easy.

Sounds rather good despite being Windows only at the moment and having a slightly slower than I’d like interface. But this is beta software with improvements forthcoming.

[ Lunascape 6 Beta ]