First spotted by Lee over at the Download Squad, the latest official beta of Firefox 4 has been released by the Mozilla development team responsible for the web browser. The release is currently in distribution which means it may take a while before it becomes officially available on the homepage.
Currently, Firefox 4 Beta 7 is served to downloaders, even on the Beta 8 release notes page which does not feel right to say the least.
But that appears to be a temporary problem only, as downloads will be redirected as soon as the new beta of the Internet browser has been spread to all mirror servers.
Do not expect lots of new features or changes in this beta or coming betas. The team has already stated that Firefox 4 is feature complete which means there will only be changes to the design, and of course bug fixes, loads of them.
The Firefox Sync setup experience has been greatly improved across desktop and mobile devices
Speed, functionality, and compatibility improvements to WebGL
Additional polish for the Firefox Add-ons Manager
Reads the release log. Not a lot to go by to be honest. The interesting part begins below the changes in beta 8, the overall features that have been added to Firefox 4 so far.
A long list, some highlights include:
- Uses JägerMonkey, a new, faster JavaScript engine, JavaScript speed improvements
- Certain rendering operations are now hardware-accelerated
- Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system
- You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
- Support for many HTML5 controls and features
There are also controversial features like Panorama or the removal of the status bar and the replacement of it with the add-on bar, or the display of link destinations in the address bar and not the new add-on bar.
Users who do not want to wait for the download links to be updated on the Mozilla website can use one of the release mirrors to download the new Firefox 4 Beta 8 right away. (via)
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Firefox 4 Beta 7 Released, Feature Complete
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Few improvements with the version FF4b7, bad conception of Panorama, 6 months too late, not fast enough …
The one reason I still use it, it is because I want to protect my private life
The ad before this article was for Chrome, the ad after was for the IE9 beta. Hilarious
@Mark: What ads ? :P
I’ll still wait for a stable release because of extension compatibility (and a status bar extension.
Martin, can you or one of your readers help me?
I’m trying to customise FF 4 beta 8:
I’ve got this in my userChrome.css:
#urlbar { font-size:16px !important; font-weight:bold !important; color:black !important; }
My problem is this: when we hover over a link, this link’s URL also appears in the address bar but with a light gray font. Can I change that to another color? Currently no matter what the color of the present page’s URL is (black in the above example), the color of the link being hovered on remains gray which is a visibility problem for me.
Thank You and Season’s Greetings to all at GHacks!
I got the answer here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1932773&p=10249487#p10249487
courtesy rob64rock.