Although the final release of Firefox 4 has been postponed until the beginning of next year, the latest beta-iteration of our little browser-friend is a huge step forwards!
Up until beta6 a number of very nice features had already been added; tabs on top and grouped tabs, a new add-on manager, Firefox sync, lots of HTML5- and CSS3-features, support for the webm video codec, support for WebGL (3D on the canvas), hardware accelerated graphics, …
But despite all of these exiting changes, there was one elephant in the room; javascript speed. Chrome and Safari were miles ahead and even Opera and Microsoft IE9 were boosting important advances in that area. And that is where beta7 makes a huge step forward; Firefox 4 sports a new Javascript-engine and is now in the same league as Chrome and Safari even beating them in some tests and that speed difference is immediately obvious after upgrading from beta6 tot beta7.
So Firefox 4 is getting ready for prime-time; lots of great new features, fast and -in my experience- very stable. Guess it’s time to upgrade my lovely wife’s Firefox 3.6.x to the brand new 4 beta 7! I do hope she’ll find the location of the reload button though …
