After spending a bit of time with it, I think I can finally write an editorial on some first impressions of Firefox 4.0 Beta 1, the first public beta release by Mozilla. I'll go over the speed improvements, vast user interface changes, and most importantly, what I like and dislike so far.

Speed
Speed has always been an issue with me in Firefox, which is why I switched to Chrome over a year ago. You can see more on that in my very hotly discussed How Mozilla Firefox is Falling Behind editorial I wrote a few months ago. It seems as though Firefox is starting to catch up a bit. In some aspects, Firefox was faster than Chrome and I have to say it took me by surprise. But in other cases, it was slower. It's odd, because it's kind of like the process of loading pages in Firefox has a rhythm. Many load within a certain time frame. I found that Huffington Post loads just as fast as Google.com. Of course, this makes Huffington Post faster than Chrome, but Google slower than Chrome (and any other browser for that matter, except maybe IE). So we'll see. So far it's pretty good, except startup times are still medicore, and I'd like it to be faster but it's getting there.

UI Changes
Mozilla Firefox 4 is such a breath of fresh air when it comes to a revamped user interface. Firefox 3.x still had that same old colorful Windows XP-styled look mainly noticeable on the toolbar and I'm glad Firefox 4 ditched it completely. It's a nice fresh look to it and it's very much welcome. But then there are some issues. First off, Mozilla, what the hell are you doing with the status bar at the bottom still? That needs to go and it needs to go now. I understand some addons still rest there -- which by the way I really like the new Addons manager -- but I don't care. Find another place for them and move on. It's one of the many screen real estate issues in Firefox 4. In addition, the big, orange "Firefox" menu at the top left takes up way too much space. It's in line with the minimize, maximize, and close buttons on Windows and everything in between is just Windows Aero... A.K.A. blank. It should instead be a small icon that's inline with tabs.

Acid3 Test
Mozilla Firefox scored a 97/100 on the Acid3 web standards test. It's great, but I'd really like it if all browsers would just shoot for 100/100 like Safari has successfully been accomplishing for a long time.

Security
Again, it's hard to go in depth with security but after all this is only some first impressions. But I have to say that I love Firefox's security and I've always been a fan of it. For some, that's the reason they love Firefox (but it's mostly because of the addons). Personally, I choose speed over security, but Firefox does deliver in that respect. Just one example: I like the way Firefox highlights websites in blue or green in the toolbar when it's an encrypted connection. It brings peace of mind.

So there you have it, my first impressions of Firefox 4. Overall, I'm fairly impressed with what Mozilla had to serve up in this release. It's a great improvement and I'm hoping that by the final stable release, they patch up my firm issues with the UI.