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

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

According to InfoWorld IE 8 users aren’t for very long.

As of 8:00 am Monday, IE8 — released Thursday — held 1.86% of the browser market, down from a high of 2.59% on Sunday, according to market watcher Net Applications. The most likely reason for the decline is that early adopters of IE8 are switching back to the more familiar, and –at this point — reliable Explorer 7 browser.

I was never even able to download IE 8 when I tried Thursday, server timeouts, I guess it’s all as well, because I’d probably be in that .73% downgrading. I’ve actually tried IE 8 on Windows 7 beta and I wasn’t all that impressed, just looked like IE with a couple of new buttons. The whole web slice thing drove me crazy too. Every time you would highlight the little button would pop up and be overall annoying.