The latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox 4 beta is now available for download.
The current release (9) boasts faster start-up time, improved bookmarking and accelerated rendering of complex animations.
Other Firefox 4 (beta) features include:
- App Tabs.
- Panorama.
- Integrated FF sync, across computers and mobile devices.
- Full HTML 5 support.
“[Firefox 4 allows] developers to create new ways for people to enjoy the Web,” a Mozilla spokesperson explained in an official blog post.
“This includes WebM and HD video, 3D graphic rendering with WebGL, hardware acceleration and the Mozilla Audio API to help create visual experiences for sound.”
Meanwhile, director of FF development Johnathan Nightingale called on team members to step-up their debugging efforts so that a final release candidate (RC) can be cleanly be coded over the next few weeks.
“‘When it’s ready’ doesn’t mean we can take our time. Firefox 4 is good for the web, good for our users, and puts the heat on other vendors to up their own game. We need to ship it ASAP – we want release candidates in weeks, not months. And that means a hard look at our blocker list,” Nightingale explained.
“Blocker bugs have a rank order. If you can’t have all of them, there are some you’d want more than others, even though every single one of them is a bug we want to fix. That’s healthy. Building software means making those calls. Each bug is evaluated against whether it’s worth holding back the thousands of fixes that have already made it into the Firefox 4 tree. [Still], at this point, very few bugs are worth holding back that much awesome.”
Interested?
Firefox 4 beta (version 9) can be downloaded here.
