Firefox 4 For Linux Video / Screenshots Preview (Beta 7 Pre)

Firefox 4 won't have the menu it has on Windows - according to THIS bug report, but it does have the other new features.

Because there have been many changes to the Firefox UI for Linux lately (last week or so), I made a video showing these new features:

(make sure you watch it in HD - it plays in HTML5 if you've enabled it on YouTube!)

And for those who don't like videos, here are screenshots too:

Panorama search

TabCandy is now called Panorama and is available in the official Firefox builds. A few days ago, Panorama got a cool search which highlights the tabs that match your query:

Faster restore

A change yesterday makes Firefox 4 loads a limited number of tabs at a time (3 by default) when Firefox restarts so Firefox should now be a lot faster when it starts if you had a lot of tabs open. The prioritized tabs are the most viewed and visible tabs. You can customize the number of tabs Firefox can restore at time by changing the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs value in about:config. You can see this feature in action (though it's not really noticeable, you have to use it to see what it's about) in the video.

New features replace the statusbar completely

Another recent change allows you to completely remove the statusbar as you don't need it anymore because of some tweaks to the user interface: you can now see a tab progress bar under the location bar as well as on the tab itself for unfocused tabs:

Also, hovering a link will display it in the location bar:

Try Firefox 4 nightly build in Linux

If you want to try out the latest Firefox nightly builds, there are several options: you can use FoxTester, download the latest nightly build and run it manually (extract the archive and run the "firefox" file - important: not firefox-bin!) or if you're using Ubuntu you can use the Mozilla Daily PPA (but be careful, it will also install the latest Firefox 3.6.x nightly!)