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11 November 2010, 11:28

Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 7

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Firefox Logo Following several delays, the Mozilla developers have announced the arrival of the seventh beta of version 4.0 of the open source Firefox web browser. According to Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan, the latest development version includes a number of important performance improvements, helping pages load even faster than in previous beta versions and in the current stable 3.6.x branch.

The significant performance gains come from the inclusion of the JägerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, allowing even faster start-up time, better page load speeds and increased web app performance. Developers can now render 3D graphics using WebGL with an OpenGL-capable graphics card on Windows or Mac OS X. Support for other graphics cards, specifically those from Intel, and support for Linux systems will be added in future beta releases. Other changes include support for the OpenType font format, improved HTML forms and a variety of bug fixes from the previous betas.


Zoom Firefox 4 Beta 7 on Mac OS X.
Support for more hardware-accelerated graphics has also been added using DirextX technologies on Windows systems and OpenGL on Mac OS X based systems. The developers note that not all graphics cards and video drivers support hardware acceleration. Further information about hardware acceleration can be found in two blog posts by Firefox Developer Joe Drew.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

The next development preview, Firefox 4 Beta 8, is scheduled for the 12th of November. A final release date for Firefox 4, however, has yet to be announced.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes and in a post on the Mozilla Blog by Sullivan. Firefox 4 Beta 7 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Alternatively, existing Firefox 4.0 Beta users can upgrade to the new version, either by waiting for the automated update notification or by manually selecting "Check for updates" from the Help Menu.

Firefox binaries are released under the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. The latest stable release of Firefox is version 3.6.12, a security update that addressed a critical vulnerability

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(crve)

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