Mozilla’s Firefox 4 (beta 2) released on Tuesday, a fulfillment of the developers’ plans to offer increased releases during the developmental process. Which demonstrates the project’s intent to compete against both Google and Microsoft in the browser war.

Beta 2, after all, is coming just three weeks after beta 1 of Firefox 4 makes its debut. And it is still only 5 days after the promised release date.

Many tech insiders applaud the Mozilla’s efforts to overhaul the user interface and address the performance gaps in Firefox to become more competitive against the other big open source browser in Google Chrome.

The plans for a next generation user interface (UI)  innovation, which has been dubbed Tab Candy by Mozilla, promises to  leapfrog Google’s browser if implemented properly. The enhanced UI in these early Firefox 4 betas, which is optimized for Windows 7 and Mac OSX, already make a huge dent in overcoming its feature deficits vs. Chrome. The Firefox team still has some work to do against its open source rival on the technical and marketing side. However, its loss of mindshare to Chrome is more of a perception than it is a reality, according to NetApplications. Who reports only a .05% loss since June 2008 when Google Chrome was launched.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost far more market share since Google entered the browser market. In December of 2008, just months after Chrome’s release, Microsoft held 75 percent share of the browser market. By the end of June, IE’s share was down to 60.32, which was down substantially — by six percent — from January of 2009 (66.35%). During the same period, Chrome’s share increased to 7 percent, from a mere 3 percent in January of 2009.

Mozilla faces a strong battle against Chrome which is preparing to release Chrome 6.  The real loser will prove to be Microsoft, given that its browser share has been cut by 15 percent even before Google’s Chrome OS hits the streets.