14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has already moved past the first Beta Build of Firefox 4.0, and is cooking the next development milestone. And it appears that early adopters currently running Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 could very well upgrade to Beta 2 by the end of July 2010. Of course, nothing is set in stone at this point in time, let alone the release date for Firefox 4.0 Beta 2, but the open source browser maker did note that it is targeting a July 22nd release. In fact, Mozilla even said that “would like to ship on or about July 22nd” giving itself a little elbow room with the upcoming development milestone.
When Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 came out at the start of this month, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, made it clear that the company was looking to deliver additional testing releases once every two to three weeks. This does mean that the delivery of Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 is right on track according to the schedule mentioned by Beltzner.
Of course, Mozilla first has to deal with the blockers/severe bugs that are preventing Firefox 4.0 from graduating to Beta 2. At the same time, the evolution of the open source browser will continue, both under-the-hood and on the surface. At this point in time Mozilla plans to introduce Tabs-on-top to the Firefox 4.0 version designed to run on Mac OS X, just as it did for the Windows flavor of the Beta 1 release. Additional enhancements will involve add-ons manager UI post-install confirmation/notification, CSS transitions and Retained Layers.
Below you will be able to find a list with the most notable new features and capabilities of Firefox 4.0 Beta 1:
“- Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only - OSX and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change. - On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with the Firefox button. - You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar. - New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release). - Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions. - The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux. - The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you'd like). - Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. - CSS Transitions are partially supported. - Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time. - Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently. - Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format. - An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default. - Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API. - Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs. - More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction. - Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload. - CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user's browsing history. - New HTML5 parser. - Support for more HTML5 form controls.”
Firefox 4.0 Beta 1 is available for download here.
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