Firefox 4 is now officially with us. Theres a full review of Firefox 4 here.

Firefox once enjoyed the liberal underdog status which helped it win market share from Internet Explorer, however, now the IE9 is out (with Internet Explorer 10 rumoured to be in the pipeline) and Google Chrome encroaching on it's market share, Firefox is finding itself being squeezed in the middle.

Apart from a new minimalist interface and 3rd party advertising cookie blocking (which both Chrome and IE do now anyway) there is little to get excited about the new version. It's still got problems with releasing memory, and flash has a tendency to crash the browser on a few sites. Site rendering and javascript performance is a hit and miss affair. Depending on which benchmarking system you use, Firefox 4 is better in some, and worse in others than the other 2 main rivals, as the graphs below illustrate.

All in all, Firefox 4 is a slight improvement over its predecessor, but I don't think it will steal the browser crown just yet.