Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 7 Released

The newest beta of the newest version of Firefox was released just hours ago.

Firefox 4 is the upcoming version of the world's second most widely used browser and features many upgrades over previous versions, including revamped user interface for Windows and Mac users (which we have seen previously), Tab Panorama (previously called Tab Candy), completely new HTML5 parser, hardware acceleration, support for newer HTML/CSS2/CSS3 standards and super speedy JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine compiler, among many others.

Beta 7 is the feature freeze beta -- basically, we don't expect to see many UI changes or new feature introduction after Beta 7, if at all. The upcoming betas (there will at least be a Beta 8) will probably polish the browser from behind-the-scenes, such as performance improvements, security fixes and hardware acceleration for a wider set of computers. For this reason, Beta 7 should give a pretty good idea what to expect when Firefox 4 gets officially released as a stable version.

Sadly, progress strips on the individual tabs have been removed, and I could not find justification for this action at Mozilla blogs or even Bugzilla.

I would recommend Firefox 3.6 users to give it a try, especially when installing Firefox 4 does NOT uninstall Firefox 3.6, and, um, the fact that my blog is specially designed for the upcoming browser (though all features are available at Webkit-based browsers too).

Download the new beta at http://www.firefox.com/beta.