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Mozilla claims it plans to release its second beta version of Firefox 4 "on or about July 22," bringing Mac users a key new user interface that the very first beta allowed by default solely on Windows.
That feature, christend tabs on top, follows a simlar look of Google Chrome and Opera, in which tabs get top billing over the address bar. It's not game changing, but it's dificult to change the habits of software used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, so Mozilla has made it simple to switch off and has been taking pains to explain its tab rationale.
"Recently modern browsers have been transitioning to placing tops on top, and that decision isn't arbitrary, it isn't about fashion," said Firefox user interface designer Alex Faaborg. "The change to placing tabs on top isn't about one browser versus another browser, it's about the evolution of the Web as a platform."
Not everyone completly agrees. Apple tried a tabs on top approach with the Safari 4 beta over a year ago, but returned them to a lower position for the final release. It kept that design for Safari 5, too.
According to Mozilla's Firefox research meeting agenda, also coming in the Firefox 4 second beta are CSS transitions, new feture of the Cascading Style Sheets technology used for Web page formatting. Transitions allow visually elaborate changes in a Web page's state, as an example, making photos in a slideshow flip out of the way as a person moves from one picture to the next.
CSS transitions allow the spiraling arrival and departure of the slides in a demonstration by Mozilla's Paul Rouget at last week's Mozilla Summit 2010.