The jump from Thunderbird 3.3 to 5 is a big one. The most likely explanation is to sync the versions with the Firefox web browser.

The release notes list the new add-on manager as one of the few changes of the new release. The add-on manager is now identical to the add-on manager in Firefox 4.

Other changes include options to reorder and drag tab to different windows, the display of attachment sizes next to attachments and a revised account creation wizard that promises improved account set ups.

Users who do not have Thunderbird installed on their system can download the latest beta version of the email client from the early releases download page on Mozilla Messaging. The beta version is available for all supported languages and operating systems.

Mozilla has released the third beta of the Firefox 5 web browser as well on the same day. It is again possible to check for updates manually by clicking on Help > About Firefox. Keep in mind that only Firefox Beta users will see the new update. Users who are running the stable version of the browser or the Aurora / Nightly builds won’t get the update notifications.

Users who do not run Firefox Beta yet can download the latest beta channel release from the Future of Firefox download page. There they can download the latest Firefox Beta and Aurora releases.

Release notes have not been published yet. interested users can take a look at a list of all bug fixes in Firefox Beta.

So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes mention support for CSS animations as the only new technology included in the release.

The developers have added support for version switching in the browser which Firefox users can use to switch between final, beta and aurora releases.

The channel switcher is accessible via Help > About Firefox / Aurora.

Another change is that the Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to the Privacy tab of the browser’s options for increased visibility.

Please note that this preference is just sending a do-not-track header to all websites that you open. The feature is only effective if websites and scripts follow the request.

Other areas have seen improvement. The developers have improved the canvas, JavaScript, memory and networking performance, standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas, spell checking and desktop environment integration on Linux.

The full list of bug fixes in Firefox 5 Beta is available here.

So where can you download Firefox 5 Beta? You can check out my Firefox Download guide for the big picture or head over to Mozilla to download the beta from the Future of Firefox page.

Don’t worry if you download Aurora instead of the beta. The new channel selector is included in both versions, which means you can use it to quickly switch from Aurora to Beta and vice verse.

What’s your take so far on the rapid release cycle of the Firefox browser?

The website currently links to beta 11 which eventually will be replaced with the download link to the newest beta of Firefox.

The Firefox 4 Beta 12 changelog has been posted and it lists several of the more “popular” improvements in this version of the web browser:

• Increased performance while viewing Flash content
• Improved plugin compatibility with hardware acceleration enabled
• Hovering over links now displays the URL at the bottom of the window rather than in the location bar
• General stability, performance, and compatibility improvements

One interesting change is that link hover information have been moved back down just above the Firefox add-on bar and almost exactly like Google Chrome and other browsers display those information.

Firefox users who access multimedia contents will benefit from performance and stability gains in the latest beta version.

The full Firefox 4 Beta 12 changelog lists hundreds of changes and fixes, all linking to a Bugzilla error reporting page.

The majority of Firefox ftp and http mirror sites appear to host the new release already. Interested users can take a look at the mirror directory to download the release before the official announcement on the website.

What are the next steps? The team builds the Firefox 4 Release Candidate which is likely to ship in the beginning of March. Eleven hard blockers are left that need to be fixed in the coming builds. The final release will follow suite soon thereafter, provided that no serious issues are discovered in the meantime. (via)

Interested users can take a look at the Firefox 2011 Roadmap Updated, Expect Firefox 7 in 2011 and our guide Firefox 4 Essentials: What You Need To Know Before Making The Switch that prepares users before they make the switch to Firefox 4.

Asa Dotzler confirmed yesterday that Firefox 4 Beta 12 “went to builds” on February 22. He furthermore mentioned that “this final (!!!) beta contains fixes to more than 200 hard and soft blockers”. The important word here is final which means that beta 12 will be the last beta before the release candidate.

He notes that there is still some patching to do for the release candidate build, with 26 remaining blockers of which half “have patches in some state of evaluation”. Mozilla has not yet revealed a release date for the final beta, release candidate and final version of Firefox 4. It is however likely that the beta will be available in the coming days, maybe even today.

I let you know once it becomes available so that you can update your beta versions of Firefox 4 to the latest as quickly as possible. Asa posted an interesting link in the newsletter pointing to Facebook’s updated HTML5 games benchmark which sees Firefox in the lead followed by Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome. Opera and Safari follow with a big performance drop. The reason? Hardware acceleration. The three browsers that lead support hardware acceleration, while the other’s do not at this point in time. Opera however has already mentioned that they plan to integrate hardware acceleration in a future version, and that it will support at least the Windows XP browser as well.

Back to Firefox. If the developers stay on track it is likely that we will see a final release of Firefox 4 in the first half of March 2011.

Mozilla notes that there has been a “huge increase in daily comments about memory and CPU usage” and that users reported that Beta 11 of the Internet browser felt slower than Beta 10.

The feedback summary lists several heavily reported issues, from constant reloading on Hotmail and Flash related crashes on Facebook games and Gmail over font rendering issues on Windows and Gmail lock ups to the inability to switch search engines and broken Facebook chat.

A closer look at individual user feedback shows that some users have experienced memory usage of up to 1.4 Gigabytes and 100% cpu usage. The majority of users are however reporting memory usage of a few hundred Megabytes.

It is not clear yet how the team will react on the increase in reports. Mozilla aims for a March release of the final version of Firefox 4, a doable task with only 8 open blockers left of which seven have a patch ready. The performance and stability issues on the other hand could in worst case postpone the release of the browser once again.

The coming days will show how the developers react: Will there be another beta or will they be able to fix the issues in the release candidate of the browser?

Have you worked with the latest Firefox 4 beta? Let us know what you think of it.

The Tell Web sites I Do Not Want To Be Tracked option is an opt-in option which means that it is disabled by default. Firefox 4 Beta 11 or newer users find the option under Tools > Options > Advanced. It is not clear why it has been moved to the advanced tab and not the privacy tab where it feels more natural.

The feature activates a Do Not Track header that will signal websites that the user wishes to opt out of behavioral tracking. Websites have to interpret the header correctly and advertisers need to abide by it for it to have a positive effect.

The second change is only visible in pre releases of Firefox 4 Beta 12 or later. Mozilla has finally changed their mind and moved the link url information from the Firefox 4 address bar back to the bottom of the browser screen. The urls are now displayed in a Google Chrome like fashion in the lower left corner of the screen. Users who have the add-on bar enabled will notice that the link information are posted above the toolbar.

The move is definitely a step in the right direction considering that felt alienated by the decision of the development team to move the information in Firefox 4 to the address bar. It is interesting to see that the team is reverting some of the design and interface changes they did introduce in earlier development builds of the browser. Interested users can download the latest official beta from the Mozilla website.

Experience has shown that it takes between 12 to 48 hours before the release is officially announced on the Mozilla website. Computer users who are already running Firefox 4 Beta 10 will receive update notifications in the browser at around the same time. Some users may want to try Help > About Minefield to see if the update is already recognized by the browser.

The release notes have not been updated yet, they still link to the release notes of Firefox 4 Beta 10. The release won’t offer any new features as it has been primarily been used to reduce the number of existing blocker bugs that need to be fixed fully before the new browser can be released.

The new beta is already on the official release server. We do not link to that server out of courtesy but you can find it easily yourself. You could also try one of the worldwide mirror servers to download the new beta of Firefox early. The mirror servers are currently being populated with the new release and it may take a few hours before they become available there.

Christian Legnitto, the Firefox release manager, made it clear on his blog on February 1 that there will indeed be two additional betas before the development team moves to the release candidate stage. “The current plan is to build [beta 12] when the remaining betaN hardblockers are done” which “is heavily dependent on fix and blocker creation rate” said Legnitto in the blog post.

This basically means that the team did not manage to resolve all serious issues yet. The plan is to release Firefox 4 Beta 11 to the public for testing, work on the remaining issues, build Beta 12 and release it to the public as well.

Mozilla last year postponed the release of Firefox 4 to the first quarter of 2011. Developers hinted at a late February releases which may be in jeopardy because of the recent development. It may be that Mozilla has to postpone the final release of Firefox again, since the team has to work on two beta releases and at least one release candidate before the final version can be build and released. Firefox 4 Beta 11 is expected to be released in the coming days, we keep you posted as usual.

Interested users can download Firefox 4 Beta 10 from the official Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta project page. The beta is offered for Windows, Linux and Mac. It will automatically update to Beta 11 once it becomes available.

Firefox 4 Beta 10 is not the last beta. Plans are to release beta 11 before the end of this month. If plans go ahead as planned it will be the last beta release before the release candidate.

The tenth beta of Firefox 4 fixes many issues, a complete list of bugs fixed in the release is accessible here.

Notable fixes include improvements in memory usage, compatibility and stability improvements when using Adobe Flash on Mac OS X and support for a graphics driver blacklist to improve stability.

The full changelog listing those features and features that have been added in previous beta versions is available here. Downloads are provided on the same page.

Firefox users who are already working with a beta release can use the internal updating mechanism to update their browser to the latest beta version.

It pays to look at the known issues before doing so, especially if its the first time a Firefox 4 beta is installed on the system. Among the issues are problems with Hulu which blocks access to contents because of an “incompatible” browser (caused by a whitelist of user agents which has not been updated to include Firefox 4), slower scrolling in Gmail for some users and problems when downgrading to a beta release before beta 8.

It is likely that the announcement will be posted on site later today. Probably the biggest change in the latest beta is the inclusion of the IndexedDB web standard “for the storage of significant amounts of structured data in the browser and for high performance searches on this data using indexes” (via).

Interested users can download the latest Firefox 4 beta from official mirror servers that offer both http and ftp connections.

At least one additional beta will be released before the release candidate stage is reached. Firefox 4 Beta 10 Pre has already been in development for a few days and is available on the nightly servers. The beta is used to reduce the open bug count to zero.

Mozilla plans to release the final version of Firefox 4 in February 2011. (via)

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)

Firefox 4 Beta 7 was originally scheduled for a mid September release which means it is almost two months late. The developers had to fix several blocker bugs that kept them from releasing the new beta on time. Probably the most interesting addition in the beta is the inclusion of the new JavaScript engine JaegerMonkey which speeds up the processing of JavaScript, moving the browser in the region of the fast browsers Opera and Google Chrome.

Several other changes have already been known from previous beta versions, including the removal of the status bar, the addition of the add-on bar in its place and the url bar that now displays link urls when the user hovers the mouse over links on a webpage.

Users who have not tested Firefox 4 release so far will have to get used to other changes as well. This includes the one-button menu, the new tab management feature Panorama, the new add-on and plugin manager and other layout and design changes.

The official Mozilla website has not been updated yet with the download link of the new version. The new beta release is however already available on the Mozilla ftp server and third party download portals such as Softpedia.

The next official release will be Firefox 4 Beta 7 which the developers want to ship in early November. This version will be the code freeze version, meaning that there won’t be any changes from that point on to the interface, apis and features of the browser.

The plan is to engage an audience of more than two million Firefox 4 Beta users from that point on to receive product feedback and sort out bugs, instabilities and security issues before the release candidate ships in 2011.

According to Mike Beltzner, the final release of the browser will be close behind the release candidate if all goes well in the development. If not, we may see more delays.

s those who have been tracking our nightly builds know, great things are happening with Firefox 4. The user interface changes are converging, the graphics and layout features are wrapping up, and recently the JavaScript engine was dramatically improved. The result is a fast, capable Firefox that provides better speed and responsiveness for web applications and users. Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability. As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready.

Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the “feature complete” Beta 7 milestone against which our Add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta

The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December. Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind. Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members.

Take a look at the official Firefox 4 Beta schedule for a closer look at the development milestones. There is also a small faq available that answers some questions that users may have regarding the browser.

It was almost clear that the developer’s would not be able to meet the release deadline for the browser. Instead of rushing the product they made the decision to delay the release to sort it out.

What’s your take on this development? Let me know in the comments.

The short time between the two releases already indicates that only a few updates and fixes could have made it into the new release.

Firefox 4 Beta 6 fixes five bugs, one of which a critical stability bug affecting Windows users, another causing rendering errors with plugins affecting Mac OX X users.

Firefox users can take a look at the full bug listing at Bugzilla to read about all fixes in the new beta release of Firefox 4.

The latest Firefox 4 Beta 6 is available for download at the official release notes page.

Preview releases of the next Firefox 4 beta have already appeared on the Mozilla ftp server, which indicates that there will be at least one additional beta release before the first release candidate sees the light of day.

Have you tried a Firefox 4 Beta? Let us know what you liked, and what you did not like in the comments.

So what’s new in the latest Firefox 4 beta? The add-on manager has been redesigned with a new color scheme. The functionality on the other hand seems to have remained the same. Still no option to search for and install add-ons from the manager.

add-on manager

Hardware acceleration should be enabled by now by default, at least on Windows. A new setting has been added to the browser’s options to disable hardware acceleration. you find it in Tools > Options > Advanced > Use Hardware Acceleration When Available.

hardware acceleration

Finally, the new single menu at the top has been revamped. It opens additional menus when the user hovers with the mouse over an arrow at the end a particular menu item.

firefox 4 menu

The menu is actually not as intuitive as it looks like on first glance, as it happens that submenus pop up accidentally whenever the mouse cursor moves over an arrow icon. Keep in mind though that you can return to the old menu structure, or display it temporarily by pressing Alt.

Firefox 4 Beta 5 will be available later today. Users who do not want to wait that long can download it from the Mozilla ftp server, or wait until the download portals have uploaded the new version to their servers.

The next major iteration of Firefox comes closer to the first release candidate which is slated for an October release date. At least three additional beta releases will follow before the appearance of the release candidate.

Firefox 4 Beta 4 continues where the last beta left off. Firefox Sync is enabled by default, and the Tab Candy, Tab Sets, we mean Tab Groups feature has been renamed once more, at least in this beta build. The feature can now be accessed with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Space.

firefox4 beta4

Direct2D rendering is still not activated by default on Windows. Windows users who want to turn the feature on should take a look at Enable WebGL, Direct2D Rendering In Firefox 4 Beta for instructions on how to turn the feature on.

The release notes have not been updated yet, which makes it difficulty to find out if other features have been added or modified in the new release. We will conduct some speed tests right after the publication of this article, and update it accordingly once they are done.

Update

Firefox 4 Beta 4 manages to score a 97 out of 100 in the Acid 3 test, a 200 and 9 bonus points in the HTML5 test. It still lacks behind speed wise both in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and the Peacekeeper browser benchmark, but manages to close in slowly but steadily.

The browser overall feels pretty stable after some first testing and shows great progress overall. It won’t be as fast as Opera 10.60 when it comes out, but the difference won’t be significantly noticeable, and that is all that counts.

Firefox 4 Beta 4 has not officially been announced yet. The beta is as usual available on the official Mozilla FTP server. Except an official announcement later today.

The release notes have not been updated yet, which means that the official Firefox website does not offer any information at this moment about changes or additions in this beta of Firefox.

Lee over at the Download Squad however was able to discover some of the changes. The biggest additions according to him are the addition of multitouch support on Windows 7, and improvements to the execution time of JavaScript code in the web browser.

Mozilla expects to release two additional Firefox 4 beta versions before the release candidates and final versions of the browser. Firefox users should mark the day of the release of the fifth beta of the browser, as it will introduce Mozilla 2, the “most comprehensive iteration (since its creation) of the overall platform on which Firefox and other Mozilla products run”. While some changes have been incorporated into Firefox 3 releases, the major changes are slated for a Firefox 4 Beta 5 release.

Mozilla designer Brendan Eich mentioned Mozilla 2 in 2006 for the first time, which was originally planned to be released in 2008.

Mozilla 2 means among other things a chance to break frozen API compatibility, which removes constraints on the current architecture and allows us to eliminate old APIs and their implementations, renew and improve the APIs and code we want to keep, and realize significant runtime and code size wins. For instance, we can get rid of RDF, which seems to be the main source of “Mozilla ugliness” humorously decried by Steve Yegge.

For Mozilla 2, we will have a JIT-oriented JavaScript VM (details soon) that supports the forthcoming ECMAScript Edition 4 (“JS2″) language. Among the desirable characteristics of this VM will be a conservative, incremental garbage collector (GC). If it makes sense, we can use this GC module to manage DOM object memory instead of using XPCOM reference counting. We can use its conservative scanning code to assist in cycle collection. And we can JIT calls directly into DOM glue code entry points (provided no JS mutation has overridden a method property value), bypassing the powerful but relatively slow typelib-based dispatching machinery of XPConnect.

This will kick Ajax performance in Firefox up a notch or three.

So Mozilla 2 is not just about simplifying APIs, removing old code and XPCOM overhead, and making the source code more approachable. It’s also about material improvements to program security, which is inherently weak in all browsers implemented in languages such as C and C++. Security requires defense at every level of abstraction, from high-level JS that enforces confidentiality properties, down to buffer manipulations that should be provably memory-safe.

Firefox users can expect lighter code, and better overall performance of the web browser. The platform goals outline some of the goals the developers have for Firefox 4.

Goals include

• to improve the JavaScript performance to come near or even with Chrome 5
• hardware acceleration of the user interface, video, and other HTML and SVG content
• Fully support the WebGL 1.0 spec, with support turned on by default in a Firefox 4 beta on platforms that support OpenGL or OpenGL ES.
• Accelerate all drawing on Windows Vista and Windows 7, on compatible hardware, by shipping the Direct2D Cairo backend in a Firefox 4 beta.
• Ship WebM with performance and stability equal or better than Flash on Youtube
• Close the performance gap between Firefox and Chrome on the “Click Preferences *” tests in the Zimbra performance test harness, 30+% speedup from end of Q2.
• Improve user privacy by reducing the ability of sites to fingerprint individual users, and improve user control and privacy of cookies.
• Performance goals for reference system: Dell Optiplex 760 (Intel Core2 Duo) Windows Vista. Baseline: Chrome 5.0.375.55.
  [ON TRACK] SunSpider: 300-375ms.
  [ON TRACK] V8 Score: 3500-5000.
  [ON TRACK] JSNES: 60fps.

The coming months will be exciting for Firefox users.

The “big” new feature in Firefox 4 Beta 2 is App Tabs, which resembles Google Chrome’s Pin Tab feature. Every tab in Firefox has a new option on right-click to convert it into an App Tab. Those tabs are reduced to their Favicon and placed on the leftmost side of the tabbar.

firefox app tabs

Mozilla developers have created a short video to demonstrate the new App Tab feature

A new page loading animation has been added as well, the favicon of sites in the tabbar is replaced with a loading animation, which switches back to the website’s favicon once the page has loaded fully.

page loading

The release notes contain additional changes and feature descriptions, including:

• Tabs are now on top by default on Windows and OSX – Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
• Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system.
• JavaScript speed improvements due to engine optimizations.
• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• 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).
• Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time
• Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
• An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
• 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 Beta 2 reaches the same score in the HTML5 browser test as the last beta. The browser scores 97 of 100 points in the Acid3 test, but drops 200 points in the Peacekeeper benchmark when compared to the performance of Beta 1.

Firefox 3.6.4 Beta Build 6 is very close to the final version of Firefox 3.6.4 which is expected to be released on June 1, 2010. The release notes have not been updated yet which makes it difficulty to find out what has changed in this new build.

There are no apparent changes visible on first glance and the biggest new feature of Firefox 3.6.4, the out-of-process plugins, have already been enabled. It is likely that the developers have sorted out some bugs related to this new feature.

The new release is currently rolled out to all beta users and it makes little sense for everyone else to jump on the beta bandwagon as the final release is near. It is likely that there are not a lot changes in the final release compared to build 6 on the other hand.

The release notes are likely to be updated later today.

Users who have not downloaded Firefox 3.6.4 yet can download the latest build directly from the Mozilla Beta download page where it is offered for all supported languages and operating systems.

The release notes do not mention the changes in this build of Firefox 3.6.4. Bugzilla lists a total of 194 bugs that have been fixed in all supported versions of Firefox 3.6.4 Build 4.

This version contains the out-of-process plugins module that will run Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight plugins in their own process so that plugin crashes or freezes do not affect the rest of the web browser.