The final release of Firefox 4 is available now, but only if you are prepared to FTP it. The web upgrade goes live tomorrow, 22nd March 2011.

To get an early look at Firefox 4 simply navigate to:

ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0/

Select the operating system you want, e.g. Win32, and click to open the folder. Next select the language verision you want, e.g. en-US, and click again. Finally download and run the Firefox Setup 4.0.exe file. This is only 12MBbytes and if you already have Firefox installed the upgrade only takes a few moments.

After tomorrow you should be able to upgrade automatically in the usual way.

There are lots of nice new features in Firefox 4, but notice that all of your existing add-ins will have to be upgraded and at the moment not all of them are available for the new browser. Of the eight installed on our trial system only one was upgradable. So while the upgrade maintains your settings if you have an addin you can't live without you'll need to wait until a new version is available.

The key features of the new version are that it runs under Windows XP (unlike IE9 which only runs under Windows 7 and Vista), it supports HTML5 and WebGL, it has a modified user interface, it uses hardware acceleration and it has a new JavaScript engine - JaegerMonkey.

Better?

Yes!

Better than Chrome?

Ask the question again later.