First impressions:

Damn but I love the amount of extra space they gave us. It’s reminiscent of Google Chrome, but I like the fact that they went for a more square design rather than Chrome’s trapezium-shaped tabs. This looks much more official and serious.

That said, this is still the Beta after all, and the Firefox team is collecting data on how people use Firefox. There’s a button on the right hand side called Feedback, which has a compilation of user studies. The Mozilla team seems to be using this feature to collect data on what people are doing with their browsers. They’re doing this via the Test Pilot add-on, which comes pre-installed on Firefox 4 Beta 1. It’s a useful feature, but I’ve discovered that if you click on More Info and then click on Privacy Policy, FAQ or Guiding Principles, it leads to a 404 page not found. That’s not to say the content is missing. Apparently it’s dead links, cause if you go to the Test Pilot homepage, the relevant documents are there.

In the past 2 hours that I’ve used this new beta, I’ve already discovered something that I don’t like. While the overall look and feel is fantastic, I’m not happy with the fact that they hid the Menu bar by default. I’ve lost my Chatzilla function, which I used to click on Tools > Chatzilla. Now I need to unhide the Menu Bar, click on Tools > Chatzilla. It’s an additional step taken which I am not very fond of.

Still I like what they did with the add-ons menu. And it looks pretty on Windows 7. We’ll see how things go.

Edit: To access information about the User Studies, click on Feedback > All Your User Studies > Finished Studies. Select any of the More Info links and they’ll take you to a page with more information about that particular study. The dead links are found here, because they link to .html instead of .php so have reported it to Bugzilla. I hope someone fixes it soon!