14 DAY TRIAL // As announced yesterday, Mozilla has released an unscheduled update to the Firefox 4 Beta. Firefox 4 Beta 6, released now, is a minor update fixing a couple of issues that were deemed serious enough to be rolled out immediately and not along with the next planned beta release.
"Today we’re releasing an update to the Firefox 4 Beta to resolve two issues that have been causing problems for some of our testers," Mozilla's Firefox director Mike Beltzner announced.
"A stability issue on Windows; an issue with plugins on Mac OS X which made it difficult for users to type in some web pages, and showed white boxes over other web pages," he detailed the fixes.
"Other than these bug fixes, today’s release has the same features and functionality as the previous beta update. The beta schedule hasn’t been impacted by this additional release, and we expect the next version of the beta in the coming weeks," he explained.
A couple of days ago, Mozilla announced that the planned Firefox 4 Beta 6 will be bumped up to Beta 7 and there will be an intermediary Beta 6 to address the issues above.
The Windows issue was the single biggest cause of crashes for Firefox 4 Beta 5 users and the problem was widespread enough that Mozilla wanted it fixed right away. The Mac issue was serious as well.
However, this update does not affect the schedule and Beta 7 will be coming this month with all of the features slated for Beta 6.
There are a couple of big new features scheduled for Firefox 4 Beta 7, an important one being the integration of the new JägerMonkey JavaScript engine developed by the Mozilla team.
The new engine promises a solid performance boost, as previewed by Mozilla last week. Beta 7 will also continue the visual revamp and add a few more tweaks to the UI.
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.