San Francisco — Mozilla on Friday on the company blog announced the release of Firefox 4 Beta 9, for those of you wishing to test it out right away — is now available for download, another step towards the open source browser’s expected release before it pushes through a final version now planned to ship by the end of February.
The key features of the latest beta version of the esteemed web browser features faster start-up, enhanced bookmarking and history functions and smoother rendering of complex animations. The Firefox team released the first Firefox 4 Beta back in July. The final 4.0 release is expected as early as next month. You can download the beta here.
The newly released beta hardly contains fewer major modifications than its Dec. 22 predecessor, with barely a pair of performance improvements — one to the code that handles the browser’s bookmarks and history list — called out by Mozilla. According to Mozilla, Beta 9 sports 662 bug fixes or changes, less than half of the 1,400 it made in Beta 8, which launched a little over three weeks ago.
The release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 9 are pretty sparse, which may indicate that major bugs notwithstanding, the next version offered might be a release candidate. Interestingly enough, Mozilla picked up the tempo between Beta 8 and 9 — the interval between Beta 7 and 8 was six weeks — the company is pushing developers to get the code in shape for a “release candidate,” the last major milestone before the browser is deemed good enough to officially ship.
“Firefox 4 Beta is developed for the way people use the Web today, offering more control over the browsing experience,” the Mozilla team says. “It introduces a fresh new look and features like App Tabs and Panorama to make it simpler and more efficient to navigate the Web. Firefox 4 Beta also includes performance enhancements to make everything faster from start-up time to page-load speed and the performance of Web applications and games. Firefox Sync is incorporated into the browser with Firefox 4 Beta, giving you access to your Awesome Bar history, bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across computers and smartphones.”
Interestingly, even though most of the 400 million Firefox users around the globe have decided to wait for the final version, they would not have to wait long. In a message earlier this week to Firefox developers, Mozilla director of platform engineering Damon Sicore said Firefox 4 would likely be ready by the end of February.
“Firefox 4 Beta also enables developers to create fun Web apps and websites,” the team adds. “Firefox 4 supports a variety of Web standards, most notably HTML5 features, through which developers can create new ways for people to enjoy the Web. This includes WebM and HD video, 3D graphic rendering with WebGL, hardware acceleration and the Mozilla Audio API to help create visual experiences for sound. Director of Product Platform Management Chris Blizzard has a full overview of all developer tools in Firefox 4 Beta.”
Furthermore, it also brings with it a Chrome-like viewing area for tabs called Panorama. Whereas Chrome shows the tabs of Web sites most frequently accessed, Firefox Panorama displays the tabs that are currently open and allows those tabs to be grouped, which may provide better access to multiple sets of tabs when many tabs are open.
Firefox 4 Beta 9 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla’s site. The beta is available in more than 50 languages, with more to come. While the beta is “feature complete”, Mozilla asserts that it will still look for ways to improve upon it for the Firefox 4 final release.