The Mozilla Foundation has released an early beta of the upcoming version 4 of Firefox, its flagship cross-platform browser for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The long-awaited release introduces a number of improvements and additions over previous versions of Firefox. Firefox 3 came out two years ago, while version 3.5 of the Web browser debuted in 2009.
HTML 5 and CSS 3, the standards that are slated to power next-generation Websites, are clearly at the forefront of Mozilla's development efforts. Firefox 4 includes extended support for many of the new features that those two technologies introduce, including the Websocket API, which enables Web-based applications to access servers using arbitrary protocols like, for example, the one used by e-mail clients.

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