14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 is extremely close, and Mozilla is now offering a taste of the upcoming development milestone for download. Beta 6 continues to be the last fully-fledged Beta Build of Firefox 4.0 offered to early adopters, but testers can now also grab a preview of Firefox 4.0 Beta 7.
Mozilla has essentially made available the Release Candidate of the seventh Beta for Firefox 4.0, a nightly build, served to the Beta community through the browser vendor’s FTP servers.
Almost two months have passed since Mozilla launched the previous Beta, and in the process the Firefox 4.0 development was postponed considerably.
However, Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 will certainly be worth the wait. Testers will be able to notice a consistent increase in JavaScript performance, a boost in hardware acceleration and better HTML4 support.
Mozilla highlighted some of the changes that Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 will bring to the table, such as:
“- Uses JagerMonkey, a new, faster JavaScript engine;
- WebGL enabled by default on Windows, OS X and Linux;
- Certain rendering operations are now hardware-accelerated using Direct3D 9 on Windows XP, Direct3D 10 on Windows Vista and 7, and OpenGL on Mac OS X;
- Improved web typography using OpenType with support for ligatures, kerning and font variants;
- HTML5 Form API makes web based forms easier to implement and validate.”
Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 will be followed by no less than three additional Beta releases. At this point in time Mozilla is planning to release Firefox 4.0 Beta 8, Beta 9 and Beta 10 in the next two months.
The start of 2011 will bring with it the first Release Candidate (RC) development milestone for Firefox 4.0.
Of course, the final release of Firefox 4.0 is also expected next year, with the open source browser maker promising that it will happen early in 2011.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4 Beta 6 for Mac is available for download here.