The launch and regular updates of Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta comes with many pleasant surprises. Just yesterday, Firefox announce two new features in the company blog.  Among the many new features, Panorama, a tab manager, is the most talked about. Analysts see this as a major step forward in browsing ease. Let’s hear it directly from them:

Firefox 4 Beta 4’s most visible addition is “Panorama,” a new name for what Mozilla had been calling “Tab Candy.” Largely driven by the work of Aza Raskin, creative lead of Firefox, Panorama lets users collect tabs into sets, graphically displays those sets, and when users open a tab, shows only those tabs within the group.

Mozilla, which calls Panorama a tab manager, has argued that it’s the next step in the evolution of tabs.

Firefox’s rivals have nothing like Panorama. Apple, for example, introduced “Top Sites” to Safari last year, while Google’s Chrome has had a similar “Most Visited” feature since it launched in 2008. But both simply graphically represent frequently-visited sites using thumbnails.

In addition to this, the Sync feature which was previously a plug-in, is now made an innate feature. Firefox also started with Hardware acceleration, though this is a opt- in feature. This is how you can activate Hardware acceleration.

You can try out these amazing innovations by downloading and trying out Firefox Beta 4 from this link. The official release is expected in October and shipping starts from November. We can expect even new great features to be added as the feature-freeze is scheduled on 10th September.

Check out this video of Panorama: