Firefox 4 Beta 5 Offers Souped Up Graphics , Security and More

by Sam Dean - Sep. 08, 2010Comments (1)

Mozilla is out with Firefox 4, beta version 5, downloadable here, and if you've followed previous beta cycles for Firefox you know that when the browser reaches later beta stages, it’s usually ready for you to use it. Yes, Mozilla still notes that the beta is a test version, but the latest beta is stable and worth using. In addition to new media features, it offers hardware acceleration and lots of other performance improvements.

The Firefox 4 beta includes a Feedback plug-in that allows you to send comments back to Mozilla as you try the beta. It’s part of a Test Pilot program, that you can read about more here. Firefox is just one of several Mozilla products falling under the Test Pilot program, which is billed as a research effort.

The Windows and Mac versions of Firefox 4 both have much slicker interfaces than they had in previous versions, in addition to many new features. There are a lot of new security features. It’s also worth reading Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner’s blog post about the new version’s hardware acceleration and audio features.

Beltzner writes:

“Firefox 4 Beta now takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve graphics performance. On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive websites, giving more power to the Web.”

Direct2D is built into Windows 7 and yields very fast graphics performance. Firefox 4 is going to be a major release of the browser when finalized, especially since Google Chrome continues to gain market share and Internet Explorer continues to lose share. Performance will matter a lot for Mozilla.

You can try the latest and greatest version of Firefox now. Mozilla has also said that a version for Linux is imminent.