Firefox 4 beta update adds "tab manager"

Mozilla has pushed out its fourth update to the fourth version of Firefox, letting users have full access to the widely publicized tab organization features it has been promising.

Known unofficially as “Tab Candy” during development, the new functionality in Firefox 4 will give users much greater access over how they interact with tabs during their browsing sessions.

Mozilla’s official name for this feature is now Panorama, and it allows users to put tabs aside into various sets. These sets can then be displayed and organized to allow for quicker and more seamless access to users’ most visited sites.

The fourth version of the browser’s beta also adds a feature called Firefox Sync. This is a more powerful version of the current browser’s ability to recognize users and user preferences across multiple devices.

With Firefox Sync, users who set up bookmarks, saved passwords, and open websites on one computer will be able to access all that same data on another computer. Functionality like this has been a large selling point for other browsers like Opera and Chrome. Firefox’s addition makes it beat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to the punch.

It is almost the last version of the beta before Mozilla makes Firefox 4 generally available to everyone. It hopes to bring out the new version of the browser in October. Not much is expected to change between now and then.

Users are able to download the new beta of Firefox 4 from Mozilla’s beta page.