Mozilla prepares second Firefox 4 beta launch

Cute little heartbreaker

By Kelly Fiveash, 22nd July 2010

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

The second beta of Firefox 4 is tentatively set to land tomorrow and ahead of that Mozilla has been asking testers to offer feedback about the open source outfit’s latest browser.

On Monday Mozilla ran some tests for the Firefox 4 beta 2 code freeze. It found four low-risk bugs still present in the build, but none of those were enough to put a hold on proceedings, according to Mike Beltzner.

However, he later urged a little more caution about the next beta.

Here’s where things stand:
- bug 557225 resulted in less-than-ideal hangs on startup on OSX; bsmedberg is currently testing a fix

- bug 580227 was filed for Test Pilot which wasn't fixed after the XPCOM changes; a patch is awaiting review from dtownsend

- bug 579262 remains, but at this point I don't think we'll block beta2 on it, instead adding a release note; visible regression on some YouTube videos, though, so people may have opinions that they wish to share on that score

He added that there were also two non-code related bugs to fix in the second pre-release version of Firefox 4.

Meanwhile, Mozilla called on web surfers running the first beta of Firefox 4 to get involved in a “Test Pilot” study.

“This study will explore the ways users interact with the Firefox menu bar, Firefox button (on Windows Vista and 7), and toolbar controls in the main window. By understanding how users commonly interact with these controls, we will be able to streamline and simplify the user interface in Firefox 4 Beta,” said Mozilla.

A third beta of Firefox 4 is penciled in for 6 August. A release candidate build will tentatively follow in October, said Mozilla.

The full rundown of what was baked into the first beta of Firefox 4 is here. ®

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All Reader Comments (13)

Highly Rated

Posted Thursday 22nd July 2010 14:12 GMT

AlexV

Firefox lives by its extensions

I've been running 4.0 beta as my main browser since it came out, and haven't noticed any crashes or major bugs.

I don't know about synthetic benchmarks, but browsing with AdBlock and NoScript is noticeably faster than browsing in Chrome or Opera, which don't have equivalent functionality.

No, they really don't - unless scripts can be allowed or blocked on a per-domain basis within the same page (so you can could to allow theregister.co.uk, but disallow googleadservices.com and quantserve.com), and without script surrogate functionality, you're stuck with a binary choice of either allowing or disallowing script for a site. So unless you can disallow all script for the entire site (not usually very nice), you gain no performance benefit.

The AdBlock 'substitutes' I've seen don't have anything approaching the filter list subscription and easy element selection for blocking functionality, some don't collapse the blocked elements (so even if the ad isn't present, you still get a big blank spot intruding), some download the ad even if not displayed (negating performance benefits) and so on.

Bare Firefox without extensions may be arguably not as good as bare Chrome or Opera - I personally still prefer using it, but would concede that other browsers have advantages too. With extensions in the mix, though, nothing can touch Firefox.

Posted Thursday 22nd July 2010 13:02 GMT

James Hughes 1