14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is now available for download. The past week, as Mozilla made available Firefox 3.0.9, I was telling you that Beta 4 for what used to be Firefox 3.1 was just around the corner. Mozilla was in fact aiming to get the browser snapshot out by the end of the past week, and it managed to keep the slip down to a minimum. Users can now grab the fully fledged Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, offered in no less than 70 localized versions for just as many languages. Concomitantly with the release of the latest codename Shiretoko build, Mozilla also delivered a fresh security and stability update to version 3.0, namely Firefox 3.0.10.
“Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta,” revealed Mozilla's user experience lead Mike Beltzner. “Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) Beta 4 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.5.”
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is designed as the successor of Firefox 3.1 Beta 3. Mozilla changed the version number earlier this year in order to emphasize that Firefox 3.5 is in fact a major new version of its open-source browser. In addition to coming in no less than 70 localized versions, Firefox features a number of enhancements including improved tools designed to offer users a higher level of control of their private data (Private Browsing Mode).
In addition, Beltzner enumerated the following changes: “Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation. Support for native JSON, and web worker threads. Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.”
Concomitantly with Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 Mozilla has also made available Firefox 3.0.10. The update, coming just a week after the release of Firefox 3.0.9, is set up to plug a Critical security vulnerability: “Crash in nsTextFrame::ClearTextRun()” Mozilla explained.
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Linux are available here.
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Mac OS X are available here.