Following this week’s release of the first beta of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla isn’t wasting any time and has already scheduled the second public beta for the end of the month. Google’s upcoming Chrome 6 browser is maturing and is close to be released to the beta channel.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 is now officially scheduled for a late July release, even if it remains unclear what new features the beta will include. There is no update of the Firefox Beta Wiki available at this time and all new information relates to Mozilla’s marketing campaign for the release, which will include the release of a FAQ, a new first run page and a spread the word page, among others. Mozilla hopes that up to 4 million people will download the Firefox 4.0 Beta.

As of now it seems unlikely that Beta 2 will get the new Jaegermonkey Javascript engine. According to Mozilla’s tests, the Jaegermonkey engine completes the Sunspider test in 765.8 ms, while the current Tracemonkey does the task in 710.9 ms.  However, the team sees weekly improvements and is down from 1230.7 ms on June 15. The stated goal is to take Jaegermonkey down to 500 ms.

Meanwhile, Google is improving the developer version of Chrome 6 and is, as we hear, close to be releasing the first beta of Chrome 6 in July. Version 6.0.458.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux was released earlier today and delivers several minor changes and the interface update appears to be complete. It is still unclear whether Google will be able to squeeze hardware acceleration for HTML 5 content into this release or not.

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