14 DAY TRIAL // The fully-fledged Beta development milestone of Firefox 7 is now available for download from Mozilla, after a preview release went live earlier this week. This is the first Firefox 7 testing release out of a series of Beta refreshes which will undoubtedly follow, from now and until the end of September 2011, when Firefox 7 Final is expected to launch.
Since it switched to an overhauled development process and an accelerated release pace, Mozilla has built less new features and capabilities into major new iterations of its open source browser.
However, Firefox is still evolving, and Firefox 7 does bring a collection of enhancements to the stable, starting with the traditional stability bug fixes designed to improve reliability.
Firefox 7 sports “drastically improved memory use,” to quote Mozilla. In fact, the opens source browser vendor is hoping that Firefox 7 will outperform all its rivals.
“Migration day was also kind to Beta. We uplifted more than 2,400 change sets from Aurora to Beta. Among these Firefox 7 changes are some amazing memory improvements. When this makes it to users in just under 6 weeks, Mozilla will re-take the memory efficiency crown and give our users the highly responsive Firefox they deserve. Thanks to everyone in the mem-shrink effort for making this happen,” the company said.
There are a set of additional improvements in Firefox 7, which early adopters can already experience by downloading the first Beta Build:
“• Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
• Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync
• Added support for text-overflow: ellipsis
• Added support for the Web Timing specification
• Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox. This can be enabled by installing an add-on.”
Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Windows are available for download here. Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Mac are available for download here.