Mozilla have released the first release candidate of Firefox Version 4. This version is what the development team feel is a finished browser, says Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development.

The quality assurance team are still taking feedback from users across the globe in the next few weeks, but if no major issues are found between now and then, the full production version will be released by the end of the month.

March has been an interesting one for the browsers. Microsoft are due to release version 9 of Internet Explorer on March 14th and Google have released version 10 of Chrome a few days ago.

Versi0n 4 of Firefox offers some huge upgrades for the open source platform. The user interface is much more streamlines now with the menu bar all available under a single button. The Javascript engine has also been improved for enhanced performance. and the addons manager has been upgraded to a full page interface system.

All important Tab management is improved as users can now bundle sets of tabs into seperate grouping, under a feature called Panorama. They can also keep permanent tabs at the top of the browser, for thoe pages and applications they want to leave open at all times.

Firefox 4 also offers synchronisation of bookmarks between different computers and even with Android powered smartphones and devices. The newest software also has the ‘Do Not Track' featureset which can alert website owners if the user wishes to opt out of third party web tracking.

You can grab it here

KitGuru says: This new release candidate is available for Macintosh, Windows and Linux platforms, and supports over 70 languages. Beta users will get automatic update requests.

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