The new beta of Firefox 4.0 was released today. I’m not quite willing to run Minefield (nightlies), so I’ve been eagerly awaiting this beta to fix some nagging but not show-stopper bugs in 4.0b6. One of those involved bad interactions of App Tabs with Panorama. Now the app tabs nicely decorate the side of each tab set in the panorama view.

Another nice thing is that the Option-Space key combination, which opened panorama in 4.0b6, no longer does so. That’s OK - I found that to be too easy to press anyway. It’s now bound to Command-E (right there at the top of the “View” menu).

Panorama has also been re-bound to swipe-up and swipe-down, which makes me less happy. In most apps on the Mac, those swipes are equivalent to the “Home” and “End” keystrokes – they scroll to the top or bottom of the current page. So with a little help from my new co-workers, I discovered the settings to fix that.

The full list of gesture bindings is written up here, but the two I needed to change are browser.gesture.swipe.up and .down. The scrolling commands to bind to them are cmd_scrollTop and cmd_scrollBottom.

4.0 has a number of other great UI enhancements, too. I’m excited to see 4.0 finally released!

[edit: fixed formatting]