Mozilla has launched an early beta of the Firefox 4 browser and plans to release further betas for testing every two to three weeks. The goal, Mozilla said, is to improve the development process by receiving feedback from developers quickly and getting fixes and changes tested earlier than in previous Firefox development cycles.
“Firefox 4 beta 1 includes dozens of major features and improvements,” wrote Firefox Director Mike Beltzner in a blog. “By testing them early, we’ll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions.”
Visual Improvements
The most noticeable improvement to Firefox 4 has to do with the look of the browser. “We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your web browser,” Beltzner wrote. “Also, if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the Menu bar was replaced with a single Firefox button so you can get to the most-used options with just one click.”
The other big visual change is the addition of support for the new HTML5-based WebM video format being championed by Google. “If you’re part of the YouTube HTML5 beta, WebM videos should play pretty well,” Mozilla blogger Christopher Blizzard wrote.
What’s more, Mozilla’s initial Firefox 4 beta integrates strong support for hardware-based video acceleration. “If you’re using HTML5 video and you go full screen, we’ll use OpenGL on Macs or Linux and DirectX 9 on Windows to accelerate video rendering,” Blizzard wrote. “If you’re on Windows 7 or an updated Windows Vista, we also have full support for D2D-enabled rendering.”
These changes are welcome improvements and part of the heated-up browser war, noted Al Hilwa, program director of applications development software at IDC.
“While browsers themselves are free to consumers, they have become money-making gateways to…