Phew! After a seemingly never ending development cycle, a dozen beta releases, 2 RC versions and a lot of bug fixes, Mozilla has unveiled the final version of Firefox 4 on March 22, as promised.

This is a great news for Firefox fans as their favorite browser is now revamped to the state of awesomeness with literally hundreds of optimizations, enhancements, features and better security. Those using Firefox 3.6 can now safely move on to Firefox 4 because it is much stable and offers great value.

We have covered a lot about Firefox 4 but I would still like to summarize some of its striking new features.

• App Tabs: Sites that you visit the most, you can give them a permanent spot in your tab bar by pinning them as App Tabs.
• Better Addon Manager: The new addon manager comes packed with a great UI and some subtle but really useful features. Addons are better manageable and can be set to auto-update. Some of the recently released addons now don’t require browser restart.
• Tab Grouping: Reduce clutter by organizing tabs into groups.
• Inbuilt Firefox Sync: Take your personalized settings to multiple devices by synchronizing settings, passwords, bookmarks, history and open tabs.
• Latest Web Standards compliance: Whether it be WebM, multi-touch, 3D graphics, HD video, SVG images, full hardware acceleration, HTML5 or CSS3, Firefox 4 does it all.
• Faster performance & security: With the new JägerMonkey Javascript engine, Firefox 4 offers faster start up, enhanced graphics rendering and improved page load speeds.

These are just prominently advertised features. You download it and feel the difference yourself. I have been using the betas and the RC for quite a time and I can safely say that Firefox 4 is truly fast, responsive and offers a great browsing experience. And did I mention, hardly any crashes?

Download Firefox 4. If the link still shows Firefox 3.6, download FF4 from here: (1) Windows: Firefox Setup 4.0.exe (2) Linux: Firefox-4.0.tar.bz2 (3) Mac: Firefox 4.0.dmg.

Before I conclude, here’s the official video from Mozilla describing the new features of Firefox 4.