Firefox 4 Beta 5 has been released, but it was not quite in the shape Mozilla would have hoped. It still has not all the features of the final version and there is a nasty rendering bug for OS X users. Beta 6 is now targeted as the feature freeze release, but Mozilla already says that they may not be able to keep the freeze date.
Mozilla recently said that it now aims for a release of the first release candidate of Firefox 4 in the second half of next month, but that goal may be too ambitious given the fact that Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner said that he does not believe that the development team will be able to keep the already delayed feature freeze date of September 10.
The next Beta (Beta 6) is targeted to be the feature freeze release. However, there is no officially set release date for this version yet and it appears that the new JavaScript Engine JaegerMonkey may have hit some hiccups and isn’t quite working as it should. We hear that it is close to be matching Webkit on the V8 benchmark, but it has still a distance to go on Sunspider, as it is right around a performance of 450 ms and will have to drop below 400 ms. Google, in comparison, is currently just above 300 ms with its latest Chromium 7 builds.
Following the feature freeze, Firefox 4 will not be getting any more “interactive” features, no new web platform features and will only allow limited string and API changes. We should expect mainly bugfixes as well as fine-tuning in the following betas until the RC1 release.
Beta 5 has worked out very well for Mozilla so far, with the exception of a rendering bug that affects Mac OS X and apparently was discovered too late. Meanwhile, hardware acceleration is activated by default and Mozilla is asking users to try this new feature and help out testing and improving it. The company posted a new extension called Grafx Bot that runs several tests and submits the results to Mozilla, if you agree. The goal is to evaluate how the feature is working and what may need improvement.
Overall, Firefox 4 offers two levels of hardware acceleration – content acceleration for text, images, CSS borders as well as 2 D canvas and compositing acceleration that combines those layers that already have been rendered. To see the full extent of this acceleration you will need Windows Vista or 7as content acceleration is not supported on Windows XP. Windows Vista/7 use Direct 2D for content acceleration and Direct 3D for compositing. By the way, under Mac OS X, Firefox uses Quartz for content acceleration and OpenGL for compositing.
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