And now Firefox Beta 5

[vasa1]

Firefox 4 Beta 5 Released

From what we can tell, the release of the Beta 5 is semi-official as of now, as the download link is live, but not yet published. Beta 5 was originally seen as the feature freeze update, but Mozilla pushed the freeze further into the future and Beta 6 may turn out to be the release that will be feature complete for the first time.
With no release notes available yet, we have to largely guess what Beta 5 in fact offers in terms of new features. Hardware (GPU) acceleration appears to be activated by default now,

[George]

Is it only me or did they change the rendering engine? Fonts look smaller to me now and I think I see more aliasing.

[vasa1]

Good news for speed fiends!
Mozilla: Firefox 4 Is Twice As Fast Chrome 7

According to our test results, the current stable Chrome 6 finishes the test in 19,975 ms, while the latest Chrome 7 nightly build (524.0) arrives at 19,262 ms. Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 finishes at 22,970 ms, but Firefox JS with the new JaegerMonkey engines blazes through the test in only 10,096 ms.

These tests were done using a new benchmark, Kraken, developed by Mozilla to reflect "real workloads".

[vasa1]

Rumours of what may or may not make it into FF4:
Mozilla rushes out stability fixes for Firefox
New Panorama tab manager now 'at risk' of not making Firefox 4 cut

[26Dolphins]

Hi,

The only "good" news is

Other major features, including a silent update mechanism meant to mimic Google Chrome's behind-the-scenes Windows patching, may also get the axe, according to notes posted on Mozilla's site earlier this week.

At least to my ears.

If the developers keep copying eachother, in the end, it won't make any difference which browser you use.

[Taurus]

Originally Posted by 26Dolphins

If the developers keep copying each other, in the end, it won't make any difference which browser you use.

IMHO, this is a good thing. I'd love to be able to tell my clients to use which ever browser they like best. All the competition is just making web browsers better. Keep which ever one you like sandboxed and you're good to go!

T

[bo.elam]

Originally Posted by 26Dolphins

Hi,

If the developers keep copying eachother, in the end, it won't make any difference which browser you use.

I hope that does not happen, if it does it will be like everybody using
same shirt and pants.

Bo

[Anupam]

Seems like release of Firefox 4 is delayed to early 2011. This news has been around the internet since yesterday on many blogs/sites. Here is the schedule from MozillaWiki :

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta

[Ritho]

I have been using Firefox 4 for several weeks now on Linux. I have not found any bugs or stability problems at all. But the all around surfing speed does not feel much faster that Firefox 3. Chrome still seems to load pages faster for me.

[Jojoyee]

Originally Posted by Ritho

...Chrome still seems to load pages faster for me.

I feel the same, that's why Chrome is still my no. 1 browser most of the time, with FF4 being the backup.