The release notes, as usual, list only a handful of changes that have made it into the new version of the browser. At the top of the list is an improvement for Windows users who can now update Firefox easier thanks to one less User Account Control prompt during installation of the update.

The second new feature in this version of the browser is the new line numbering of the page source code. This is actually a pretty useful features for developers as it improves the source code’s accessibility significantly.

Developers can now also use the column-fill and text-align-last CSS properties which the Mozilla developers have implemented in the browser. In addition, experimental support for ECMAScript 6 Map and Set objects have been implemented.

Firefox 12 comes with smooth scrolling enabled by default. The feature aims to improve the scrolling experience in the browser. Firefox users who experience issues with smooth scrolling or who prefer to work without the feature can disable it under Firefox > Options > Advanced > General > Use Smooth Scrolling.

Aurora users should pay attention to the known issues listing as well. Some Gmail users may for instance experience scrolling issues in the main Gmail window under this particular release.

Developers should take a look at the Mozilla Hacks article on the new release which highlights development related changes in Firefox 12.

The ESR release has been designed for companies, organizations and users who cannot keep up with deploying new Firefox versions every six weeks. Firefox ESR releases will follow the rapid release process, but increase only by a minor version whenever the standard version increases by a major version. Regular Firefox 10 users will be moved to Firefox 11 in six weeks time, while Firefox 10 ESR users will be moved to Firefox 10.1 instead.

The ESR release will be offered separately from the regular version of Firefox. Another important change in Firefox 10 is that add-ons are now automatically set to be compatible if they have also been compatible with Firefox 4. This ends the majority of the add-on compatibility issues that Firefox users experienced whenever a new major version of the browser was released.

The beta changelog lists the features one expects from a six week release cycle with the new hidden forward button the most notable change. Firefox 10 furthermore adds support for CSS3 3D-Transforms, anti-aliasing for WebGL, full screen APIs that can be used to build web apps that run full screen and support for the bdi element for bi-directional text isolation.

Developers can make use of the new CSS Style Inspector and IndexedDB APIs that match the specifications more closely

The previously announced silent update option has not made it into this version of Firefox. Mozilla aims to release the new feature with Firefox 13, which is expected to launch in the beginning of June.

Firefox users can expect to see update notifications later today. Please check out our Firefox 10 What’s New guide which looked at the changes in the Firefox 10 Aurora version.

Update: Firefox 10 Stable (here) is now available at the official Mozilla website.

Update 2: Firefox 10 ESR download links are now also available. Click here to go the page.

I covered the major changes of Firefox 8 back in August when it was released to the Aurora channel which is a new release channel between the nightly releases and beta releases of the browser.

Probably the biggest new feature of Firefox 8 from a security perspective is how the web browser handles third party add-on installations. You may have encountered those while installing a security suite on your computer or other security related products. Before Firefox 8 no checks were performed when a third party software installed an add-on for the browser. Third party add-ons were installed and enabled right away and without user notification, which, from a security standpoint, left the browser wide open for local attacks.

Firefox 8 introduces other features as well. The browser gives users more control over add-ons after upgrading to a new Firefox version. Users can now disable or enable individual add-ons on first start with Firefox suggesting add-ons that may not work due to incompatibilities.

Firefox users can furthermore configure the browser to only load the selected tab on browser start, and the remaining ones once they are activated by the user. This can speed up the start significantly. The feature can be enabled under Tools > Options > General.

The browser ships with other minor improvements and changes. Included in the browser is now a Twitter search engine to search for Twitter messages from the browser’s address bar and search bar.

The browser is already available for all supported operating systems and languages on the official Mozilla FTP server. Only a handful of official mirror servers list the Firefox 8 Stable releases currently. This is certainly going to change in the next hours. Download portals like Softpedia or Major Geeks will surely have the Firefox 8 release available for download before it is distributed to all mirror servers and announced officially on the Mozilla website.

Firefox 7 users who are not in a hurry should wait until the release is officially announced by Mozilla. Their browser’s auto-updating feature will recognize the new feature and prompt for an upgrade to Firefox 8 automatically.

The beta release notes are available here. They will be converted into the final release notes once Firefox 8 has been officially announced by Mozilla.

You may remember that both Firefox 5 and 6 did not ship with big new features or improvements. Well, this changes with the release of Firefox 7. When you look at the new features you will notice one sticking out: Mozilla managed to improve memory usage of the Firefox web browser drastically (that’s the organization’s word). What does it mean in detail? A blog post by Nicholas Nethercoate over at Mozilla has the answers:

Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.

Up to 50% less memory usage is a big number. Probably even more important than that is that the browser won’t feel like eating up all the RAM over time anymore, which is definitely a good thing, considering that the browser has a reputation for being memory inefficient.

The changelog lists addition features, including a new rendering backend that speeds up Canvas operations on Windows, support for text-overflow: ellipsis and the Web Timing specification and faster bookmark and password changes syncing when using Firefox Sync.

Firefox 7 is currently not available on the official homepage. It is likely that the developers are still preparing for the new release. Some mirror servers are already listing Firefox 7 for all supported operating systems and languages, while others do not. Expect a release announcement in the next 24 hours.

Firefox stable users will receive update notifications shortly in the browser to update automatically to the new version.

Beta, Aurora and Nightly users will also be pushed to a new version in the coming days. Check out Future Firefox Features, What I’m Looking Forward To for some pointers as to what you can expect in those versions.

Mozilla identified another issue as a consequence of this. Companies, organizations and individual users blocked the browser from updating to the most recent version because of that certification process.

• The release schedule doesn’t allow sufficient time for the organizations and their vendors to certify new releases of the products
• The associated end-of-life policy exposes them to considerable security risk if they remain on a non-current version past Firefox 3.6.

A proposal has been added to Mozilla wiki that suggest Extended Support Releases (ESR) to meet those needs. The basic idea is to offer extended support for certain releases. In the most recent proposal an Extended Support Release would be maintained for seven release cycles which would equal 42 weeks instead of the usual six weeks. The ESR releases will overlap two cycles to “allow organizations to qualify and test against Aurora and Beta builds for twelve weeks leading up to the ESR, and an additional 12 weeks to certify and transition to a new ESR”.

Mozilla proposed now that Firefox 8 or Firefox 9 would be made the initial ESR. Mozilla will support all ESRs with critical and high security bug fixes throughout their support cycle, and optionally with additional stability and security updates.

Extended Support Releases will have their own update channel so that automatic updates are available. Unlike other channels, the ESR will only be marketed through the Enterprise Wiki page and not on other Mozilla properties.

Firefox 3.6 users should note that the initial ESR release marks the beginning of the 12 week end of life cycle for the browser.

You can read up on the extended support proposal for Firefox here. I personally think that this is a step in the right direction, especially since relations between enterprise users and Mozilla have been tense since the beginning of the rapid release cycle. (thanks Ken for pinging me on Facebook)

The core reason for changing to a faster release cycle is the ability to implement and release new capabilities to give web developers the chance to use those technologies in their web applications.

A browser is the delivery vehicle for the Internet. And the Internet moves very, very quickly. Philosophically, I do not believe a product that moves at the speed of traditional desktop software can be effective at enabling an Internet where things happen in real time. If we want the browser to be the interface for the Internet, we need to make it more like the Internet. That means delivering capabilities when they are ready. That means a rapid release process. If we don’t do something like this the browser becomes a limiting factor in what the Internet can do.

Note that Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, is exclusively addressing web developers and not end users in this justification. And that’s probably one of the issues that end users have with the change in development pace. That, and the fact that new web technologies do not appear out of nowhere from one second to the next. Establishing new technologies takes a long time, sometimes years.

Asa Dotzler recently posted the timeline for the next seven versions of Firefox on his blog.

According to his posting, we will see a new stable version of the browser every six weeks from August 16, the day of the latest stable release of Firefox on.

Firefox 9 Stable will be released on December 20, Firefox 13 on June 5, 2012. All Beta, Aurora and Nightly releases will also increase in version on those days, which means that we will see Firefox 14 Beta, Firefox 15 Aurora and Firefox 16 Nightly on June 5, 2012 as well.

There is some good news at least about add-on compatibility issues. The developers have announced plans to default add-ons to compatible from Firefox 9 on which means that users will face less issues with add-ons becoming incompatible because of version changes.

Another change that we have already mentioned are improvements in third party add-on handling. Firefox previously allowed all third party add-on installations. This changes with the release of Firefox 8. The browser displays a screen that asks the user explicitly to allow or disallow the installation of third party add-ons before they are executed for the first time. It seems that this change is only affecting add-ons and not browser plugins.

A new option was added to the general tab of the Firefox options which could speed up the start of the browser for users who restore their previous browsing session. Instead of loading all tabs on startup, it is now possible to load the tabs when they are selected by the user. This is the same functionality that the previously reviewed Bar Tab add-on for the browser. The setting has been available before in the Firefox about:config configuration as browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs.

A downloads history has been added to the History window of the browser. It is now possible to find all previous downloads listed there next to web pages, tags and bookmarks. Firefox has previously saved the download history, the new addition only makes it more accessible in the browser.

Sören Hentzschel lists several under the hood changes on his blog. Firefox 8 now supports multi-process hardware acceleration which is a per-requisite for the upcoming Electrolysis project, which will move core browser elements like the UI, plugins or web contents.

Developers can check out the relevant changes on the Firefox 8 for developers web page.

Firefox 8 Aurora is already available on the official Mozilla “Future of Firefox” web page. Existing Aurora channel users should receive update notifications to update their version to version 8.

The majority of Firefox users is subscribed to the stable channel. The latest official version of that channel is Firefox 5.0.1 which will be updated to Firefox 6 on Tuesday.

But Firefox Stable is not the only channel that has received an update that is already available on the Mozilla ftp server. The Firefox 3.6.x branch is still actively maintained, and users of that branch will be quite happy that their version of the Internet browser receives an update as well. Firefox 3.6.20 is also available on the ftp server.

Firefox users who do not want to wait that long can download the new version of Firefox can download the new versions from one of the official mirror servers like this one.

Cautious users should wait until the release is officially announced on the Mozilla site and via the automatic update option of the web browser itself. It is unlikely that we will see last minute changes but it has happened in the past.

So what is new in Firefox 6? The official release log has not been updated yet. The beta changelog lists the following changes:

The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you’re visiting
Streamlined the look of the site identity block
Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
Added support for window.matchMedia
Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
Improved usability of the Web Console
Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama

The full list of changes of Firefox 6 is available here.

Only the beta release notes are available for Firefox 3.6.20 as well. The list is considerably shorter: The developers have fixed security and stability issues, and enabled downloadable font support for users running Mac OS X 10.7.

Big changes and features that will make an impact are already implemented and tested in Firefox 7. This is the version of the browser that will reduce memory usage significantly on many systems. (see Firefox 7 Aurora Shows Significant Memory Usage Improvements). (via)

So what’s new in Firefox 5? The release notes list the following new features and changes:

• Added support for CSS animations
• The Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability
• Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance
• Improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas
• Improved spell checking for some locales
• Improved desktop environment integration for Linux users
• WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures
• Background tabs have setTimeout and setInterval clamped to 1000ms to improve performance
• The Firefox development channel switcher introduced in previous Firefox Beta updates has been removed

Those are almost exclusively under the hood changes, some may be noticeable on day to day like the improved performance.

It should be noted that Firefox 5 introduces HTTP Transaction sorting by CWND which can improve page loading times considerably. See Firefox 5 Gets Faster Connections, Up Next: Memory Improvements for an in depths review and explanation of that feature.

The do not head tracker preference has been moved to the Privacy tab to get more exposure. Users can activate it to send a “do not track” request to each website they open in Firefox.

Interested users can access the complete list of bugs fixed in Firefox 5 here. Each entry links to Bugzilla where additional information can be found.

The latest version of Firefox 5 can be downloaded from the official Mozilla ftp server. It is likely that most Firefox release mirrors will offer the new version on their servers as well.

Next in line is Firefox 6, which will be released in about three months time.

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?

I have followed the development of the browser from pre-beta to the final release, and have to admit that it was not always a pleasant ride. It looked in the beginning as if the developers planned to make changes for the sake of changes, and not because they made sense or were demanded by the majority of the Firefox community.

Features like the new tab management module Panorama or the move to display mouse over link addresses in the address bar caused quite a stir among the community, and were disabled or changed in the end.

So what are the dominant new features that have been added to Firefox 4?

One can say that the new version improves the browser’s core considerably. The developers have made the Mozilla Firefox web browser faster, so that it does not take the rear ranks anymore in web browser benchmarks. The JavaScript performance alone has been improved by a factor of three (or more depending on the benchmark) when compared to the current stable Firefox 3 branch.

The version offers now comparable speeds to other fast browsers such as Internet Explorer 9, Opera or Google Chrome.

Firefox 4 comes with improved web standards support, including better CSS3, HTML5 and web graphics compatibility. Other notable features include hardware acceleration support, support for the HTML5 video WebM format, out of process plugins for Macs (Linux and Windows have it built-in since Firefox 3.6), privacy enhancements and multitouch support under Windows 7.

Interested users can access an overview, that compares the changes with previous Firefox browsers, on the Mozilla website.

As mentioned earlier, the Firefox interface has seen quite some changes. The dominating additions are the new Firefox button at the top of the browser that leads to most options of the menu bar. The menu bar has been removed as a result, and tabs have been moved above the Firefox address bar. Lastly, the status bar has been replaced and is now hidden by default.

Check out Firefox 4, How To Undo The Changes for instructions on how to revert the changes (get the old menubar back, move tabs below address bar, display status bar).

The add-on manager has been changed as well, it displays now in a tab instead of a standalone window. It is likely that some add-ons that have been working fine under Firefox 3 will not work under Firefox 4. You can try and force compatibility the following way:

Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit the return key. Accept the warning message if this is your first time, and right-click on a blank spot afterwards. Select New > Boolean and enter the value extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0. Double-click the entry afterwards after clicking OK and change the value to false.

Firefox 4 Download

The final version has been pushed to the Mozilla ftp server where it is available for all supported operating systems and languages. It usually takes between 24 and 48 hours until the release is publicly announced on the Mozilla website. We do know however that Mozilla will announce the final release tomorrow, which is the time when downloads will become available on the web page.

The only option for now is to download the release from one of the official mirror sites (for instance this one) or from one of the big software portals. Softpedia for instance lists the download already on their download portal.

Outlook

The Firefox developers have already announced plans to ship a first patch shortly after the final release has been published on the website, as it is likely that the increase in users will reveal bugs that have not been discovered before. Plans overall are to release three new major releases in this year, which would mean a Firefox 7 release at the end of the year. Plans are plans on the other hand, and we have seen how delays can break them.

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.

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 users who can wait a bit longer can check for updates manually in the web browser by clicking on The Help menu link.

The release notes have not been updated, but the beta release notes mention several security and stability issues that have been fixed

Bugzilla lists 40 bugs that have been fixed in the release, of which seven have received a critical rating.

Expect a final release later today. The Firefox client will pick up on new releases automatically once they are released officially.

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.

Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner said that Mozilla would “work on delivering those in some future release”. The 64-bit version of Firefox 4 was planned to be released for Windows only, which felt natural considering that roughly 50% of Windows 7 users selected and installed the 64-bit edition of the operating system.

The chance to be one of the first browsers to offer a 64-bit version is still there, considering that only Microsoft and Apple have made available 64-bit versions of their Internet Explorer and Safari web browsers. To be fair, Opera is also offering downloads of 64-bit FreeBSD and Linux versions of the Opera browser on their website.

Users of a 64-bit operating system can naturally run the 32-bit editions of the web browser in the meantime.

Additional Firefox 4 support related decisions have been posted in the announcement, they include:

• No support for all Mac OS X operating systems prior to 10.5 Leopard
• No support for Microsoft operating systems prior to Windows 2000
• Dropping support for OSX / PPC, Firefox 4 ships as universal builds for i386 only.

Finally, the developers are discussing the option to drop support for i386 architectures that do not support SSE2. No decision has been made on that yet.

To summarize Firefox 4′s supported platforms:

Microsoft Windows

• 32-bit builds only
• minimum version: Windows 2000
• CPU architecture: i386, x86-64

Mac OS X

• 32- and 64-bit builds (universal binary)
• minimum version: Mac OS X 10.5
• CPU architecture: i386, x86-64

Linux

• 32-bit builds only
• minimum version: tbd
• CPU architecture: i386, x86-64

Firefox users who want to keep an eye on changes to the supported platforms may want to bookmark the official Wiki page.

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.