Information Madness

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is available for test now. It is still a very early release and the final builds are not expected for quite some time to come. But if you’re even the least bit curious about what the Mozilla team has been up to, whether you’re a regular Firefox user or not, you shouldn’t miss this release.

There are a lot of new features in Firefox 4.0b1 that weren’t in 3.6. You can also help Mozilla to build the perfect browser with the direct feedback features built into the browser. Mozilla request to help make the next version of the world’s best browser.

Christopher Blizzard explained at Mozilla, "Included with the beta is a Feedback Add-on. This puts a big Feedback button on the right hand side of the browser that lets you give quick and easy feedback about something you like or something you don’t. We’ll be reviewing this feedback through the beta process, so please leave comments. The Add-On also uses Test Pilot to figure out how people use the browser – menus, how people use passwords, etc. But through this beta process we’ll also be using it to measure things like platform performance and other interesting data we need to build a great browser”.

One big area where we’ve made huge improvements in Firefox 4 vs. 3.6 is the removal of tons of I/O from the main UI thread. This means making sure that when we do history look-ups for coloring links based on browser history, that those look-ups are done off the main thread, to making sure that we’re not synchronously writing data to the HTTP cache on the main thread. This alone has improved the overall feel of the browser more than anything else.

The JavaScript engine is much faster as well, although beta 1 does not include the new JägerMonkey work. That work is well underway and will be landing through the beta process, and is already showing positive results.

At this stage of development, direct user feedback is crucial and the more the better. Part of the reason why Mozilla wanted a beta out so soon was to get as much feedback from the community as possible. Firefox 4 is still a long way out and Mozilla plans to release a new beta every few weeks for some time to come.

Firefox 4 contains a large number of performance improvements over Firefox 3.6. As a web developer you’re likely to notice big improvements in overall performance.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 1:

Firefox 4 Beta 1 (for Windows, 9 MB)

Firefox 4 Beta 1 (for Linux, 11.4 MB)

Firefox 4 Beta 1 (for Mac, 21.5 MB)