Firefox 3, Beta 4 hits the streets
Danny Gorog20 March 2008, 12:20 PM
Mozilla today released a new beta version of Firefox 3. Beta 4 builds on the existing releases of Firefox and includes more than 900 enhancements from the Beta 3 and 'drastic improvements to performance and memory use.'
Mozilla today released a new beta version of Firefox 3. Beta 4 builds on the existing releases of Firefox and includes more than 900 enhancements from the Beta 3 and includes 'drastic improvements to performance and memory use.' It also provides other fixes based on feedback from the community.
Firefox 3, Beta 4 on a Mac: it now adopts the look and feel of whatever OS you're running it on.
Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 platform, which according to Mozilla has now been under development for 31 months. Gecko 1.9 has more than 12,000 updates and substantially improves 'performance, stability and rendering correctness .'
Some of the biggest features in Beta 4 are a new download manager which improves accessibility of downloaded files plus gives more transparency to the origin of the file, and a full page zoom which lets you easily (via menu or shortcut) zoom in or out of entire pages.
Beta 4 also improves integration with Vista, Mac OS X and Linux - All versions get additional platform specific UI elements. In OS X Beta 4 supports Growl notifications and OS X widgets and spell checker (good for Google Docs users). In Vista,Firefox now has Visa-specific icons and uses 'native interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.'
Lastly, Beta 4 provides speed increases across the board with significant improvements to Mozilla's JavaScript engine. When compared to Firefox 2, Mozilla confirm that 'applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Beta 4.'
I've been using Firefox 3 Beta since it's first release. Beta 3 was reasonably stable, and definitely usable as a full-time browser. I'm sure Beta 4 will be better. Still, Mozilla recommend that the developer preview release of Firefox is only to be used for testing purposes, and shouldn't be put in production environments just yet. If you're game, you can get it here.
The biggest problem you're likely to run into is incompatibility with the many and varied add-ons for Firefox. So if you run a lot of them, it might pay to check whether your favourites are updated for 3.0 compatibility yet.