Google, Mozilla and Opera announced new developer versions of their browsers, with Google now offering Chrome pre-developer builds of its browser, Mozilla sending Firefox 4 Beta 3 into a code-freeze and confirming that Mozilla 2 will debut with Beta 5. Opera, which has just released the major 10.60 update, has released the first test version of another big update, version 10.70.
Perhaps Google’s goal to release many more Chrome versions in a shorter time frame is not quite realistic. Chrome development is already running at a breakneck pace, with tested new developer versions being released on a weekly basis. However, Google wanted to release them even more frequently, but found that it would jeopardize its testing process and could not guarantee anymore the browser’s stability.
For those who want more frequent updates, it is now possible to subscribe to the Canary Build of Chrome, which is essentially a pre-developer release that is not tested for stability. The current Canary version is Chrome 6.0.480.0, which is ahead of the current developer version 6.0.472.14. Of course, the most impatient users can always access the daily trunk builds, which are even fresher, but come with occasional hiccups and guaranteed crashes is some cases. The Canary Build can be installed next to the regular stable Chrome, the Beta Chrome as well as The Dev Chrome version. At this time, it is only available for Windows. The daily trunks, by the way, can be downloaded and run without a need for installation.
Mozilla has also news as it informed its developers that the code of Beta 3 of Firefox 4 was frozen yesterday and it appears that Mozilla may miss its original goal of an August 6 release just slightly. The briefly indicated August 20 release date is now apparently off the table. Mozilla does not provide clear information what features will be changed or added in the new beta, but it has just confirmed that Beta 5 will introduce the Mozilla 2 branch.
Mozilla 2 is a massive update for the core of Firefox that was first discussed back in October of 2006. Mozilla 1.0, by the way, was launched in June 2002. Essentially, Mozilla 2 will be turned into a C++ code base, it will get a JS2 virtual machine, and it will see a range of new features, including multithreading, GPU acceleration at its very core. While the code should be substantially lighter than what Firefox is right now, Mozilla also stated that the browser will perform much better. In JavaScript, Mozilla now wants to be within a 20% range of Chrome 5.375.55 in Sunspider, which means that Mozilla is still targeting a goal of less than 400 ms, which indicates that Firefox 4 is unlikely to beat Google Chrome, even with the new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine. Mozilla also said that it wants to be within 30% of Google V8, which means a performance of at least 3500 points. Google’s current Chrome developer versions score about 305 ms in Sunspider and 5500 points in V8. Right now, the new core and the speed upgrades cannot come soon enough as the latest developer versions of Chrome 6 have a an edge over Firefox: Chrome boots faster and renders pages subjectively much faster than Firefox, as long as there is no need for hardware acceleration.
According to the Mozilla Beta schedule, Firefox 4 Beta 5 could be the first beta that reveals what Firefox 4 will be. The browser should be ready sometime in early September.
Of course, September is also the release time frame for the first beta of IE9 and Opera may be close to releasing Opera 10.70 that integrates some upgrades to the Presto layout engine.
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