Mozilla has just released the download of the fifth beta of Firefox 4. It comes with the previously announced (and available) GPU acceleration feature as well as a new reduced menu structure.
Firefox 4 Beta 5
From what we can tell, the release of the Beta 5 is semi-official as of now, as the download link is live, but not yet published. Beta 5 was originally seen as the feature freeze update, but Mozilla pushed the freeze further into the future and Beta 6 may turn out to be the release that will be feature complete for the first time.
With no release notes available yet, we have to largely guess what Beta 5 in fact offers in terms of new features. Hardware (GPU) acceleration appears to be activated by default now, but does not offer any performance improvements over the hidden feature in the previous betas. Overall, the browser feels notably more stable as the previous versions and begins to be looking like a browser that is making good progress toward a final release. The first release candidate, by the way, is snow scheduled for the second half of October.
The most obvious change over Beta 4 is a redesign of the reduced menu. It copies some elements from Chrome and is no using graphical elements for copy, cut, and paste, which is made apparently to simplify the use of the browser on touchscreens. Overall, it is a much cleaner and much more modern light weight interface than what we have in the current version of Firefox.
We don’t know this one yet, but if we had to take a guess, we would say that the new JavaScript engine JaegerMonkey has not been integrated into the public beta of Firefox yet. There are virtually no JavaScript performance improvements over the last beta.
You will be able download Firefox 4 Beta 5 from Mozilla’s website soon or, if you cannot wait, simply by clicking here (32-bit Windows version, English).
Update: The Beta 5 is now officially available from Mozilla’s Beta page.
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