Mozilla has released the second beta of their upcoming Firefox 4 browser, fixing hundreds of bugs and improving speed along with adding support for CSS Transitions.
The company released the first beta at the beginning of July and promised the beta 2 for last week but hit small delays.
Beta 3 is expected to hit August 6th, with the first full release candidate (RC) expected to be released in October.
A main new feature for Firefox 4 is improved tab location, as shown in the picture at right. Beta 2 adds the ability for Mac users. The “tabs are given top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing.” just like in Google Chrome.
Additionally, the browser supports full HMTL5 and WebM: “As pioneers of HTML5 video standards, Firefox also supports the WebM format so you can watch open HD quality video.”
As for CSS Transitions, part of the CSS3 specification, the browser will support it, thanks to the new Gecko 2.0 page layout engine.
Just like with each new update, JavaScript has been made speedier, with other performance enhancements, as well.
Result for: layout engine
Mozilla has released a new beta version of the popular Firefox browser. According to Mozilla Developer Center Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 includes improvements to speed, performance and compatibility. Download it and you’ll also get try out couple of new and anticipated features.
The speed and performance improvements come from the updated version of Gecko layout engine and the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. TraceMonkey especially is a welcome addition as it provides a huge boost to JavaScript processing speeds. Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 also includes the new Private Browsing Mode which allows users to browse the web without leaving any traces. You can also now choose to remove the history of for example only past hour of browsing.
