Firefox 4 Beta 1 arrives

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 July 2010 14:16

Business IT - Open Source

The first public beta of Firefox 4, Mozilla's next-generation browser, is now available for download.

Firefox 4 beta 1 purports to be "stable and safe to use for daily web browsing" but the more cautious among us will most likely wait for the release version. But if you're keen to see what the next generation of Firefox is going to be like, or - more importantly - you're prepared to give it a test drive and report back to the development team (a feedback button is incorporated to make that as easy as possible), it's just a click and a 20-odd megabyte download away.

Firefox 4 includes a laundry list of new or improved technologies, including the Gecko 2.0 engine, Websockets, enhanced HTML5 support (including WebM video support), partial CSS Transitions support, and crash protection (for the Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight plugins).

There's also full support for WebGL (disabled by default), a Windows Direct2D rendering backend (also disabled by default), Mac OS X Core Animation support for plugins, and HTML History APIs.

Responsiveness has been improved through lazy frame construction (which reduces the number of times complex pages are reflowed) and asynchronous link history lookup.

Talking of link history, user privacy has been improved by blocking websites from reading the browsing history.

What else has changed? Please read on.