Mozilla has starting thinking about Firefox 4 and with these mock ups have starting throwing ideas around. There are two different versions as of now, tabs below address bar and one with the tabs above the address bar. Another thing their showing off is a combo refresh/go/stop button, where depending on what’s being done in the browser the button changes.

For those who don’t know Firefox is the leading alternative browser to Internet Explorer. In constant development Firefox is continually improving and version 3.5 should be released soon. For those that can’t wait or want to help find bugs the second release candidate has been publicly released. It’s available for download from Mozilla’s Blog. There are big improvements in memory management which has always haunted Firefox. According to this site it is now a non-issue, even out performing the other big free browsers. Another big feature is the inclusion of HTML 5 elements, and native support for open-source audio codec Ogg Vorbis.

Source: PCMag

Google’s Chromium browser (open-source Chrome) has been released for Mac and select Linux Distros, but the release page warns not to download unless you like incomplete software. Keep in mind this isn’t even beta yet, for Google that’s something. Pretty soon though Mac, Linux, and Windows user will get to enjoy Chrome. Me personally I’m waiting for an extension system like Firefox before I’ll use it solely as my browser of choice.

Mozilla the company behind Firefox thinks that the tabbed interface it’s so famous for is reaching the end of it’s lifespan. So they’re launching a design competition to come up with the next big thing in browsers.

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.
– Mozilla Labs

One interesting idea is already floating around from Mozilla Labs, having the tabs on the side instead of the top.

Source: PCPro

How many time have you been browsing in Firefox and something hang or crash, not many probably but when it does it takes down the whole browser. Now it seems Mozilla is taking a hint from Google’s Chrome, by splitting tabs into multiple processes that are independent of each other. So if one tabs crashes oh well close it and continue. The development of this project is in the beginning stages and could be up to a year to see a workable release but, it should be worth the wait.

Source: Mozilla Links