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It’s here! Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been added to Mozilla’s FTP’s, and the distribution has already begun among download sites. This release was expected by the end of February, but they must have hit a few bumps in the road. And now Firefox 3 Beta 5 is currently scheduled for late March.
If you’re wondering what’s new in this release there isn’t that much that I can show you. The release notes for Firefox 3 Beta 4 have not been updated to reflect the release, and so I winged it:
- The Vista theme now shows up correctly for those of you running Vista on your computer, and you can see the various icons in the screenshot above.
- The really good news lies in some of the improvements that they’ve made under-the-hood. For example, as we previously outlined Firefox 3 really takes the cake on the SunSpider JavaScript test. Those changes have been rolled into Firefox 3 Beta 4, and hopefully you’ll see some better performance because of it.
- Hundreds of bug fixes have landed in this release.
Okay, now it’s your turn to try it out! Mozilla hasn’t updated the official Beta site yet, but the necessary files have been added to the FTP. Our downloader, as always, balances the load across all the servers that are hosting the setup file which eases the burden on Mozilla’s servers. So download until your heart is content:
Note: The build ID is 2008030714, which means this version was compiled on March 7th. This is not the same version that was posted last week by some download sites, such as BetaNews.
The first thing I did when I got into work was see if Beta 4 was out and sure enough it was. It is really good I like the theme changes that have been implement, and I shall try it out on my Ubuntu laptop once I get home. Mozilla Links ([mozillalinks.org]) has screenshots of the various theme changes. :)
Whenever I start it up it tells me that it isn’t really beta 4, it’s a release candidate.
telling me the same thing, and my first install didn’t work.
The official release is scheduled for later today here: [mozilla.com]
It will continue to tell you that until Mozilla officially updates their website. You’ll notice that the page it is showing you is not a local file on your computer, and so they only update that site after it has officially launched. It’s to try and discourage people from making the announcement early.
couldn’t find beta 4 in the mozilla website (only shows beta 3). So got it from the link generator here, thanks. ;)
They haven’t officially posted it yet which is why it isn’t on their site, but out link generator only uses files from their server. Glad it helped you out.
Ah, sweet irony.
It is here, and it is absolutely amazing!!! Finally switched to it as my main browser.
Well guess what there is no going back now. ;)
I can’t really use any other browser now that I have been using Firefox 3.0 since the Alpha before Beta 1 (which I think it was Alpha 3 if I am not mistaken). :D
I’ve been using Firefox 3 since before the first alpha hit, and although there were some rough times it has been a rather enjoyable ride. The performance improvements are pretty significant over the previous versions.
Smooth scrolling is still slow and definitely not *smooth*. Yes, there are extensions that are better than the built-in smooth scrolling, but I think the integrated smooth scrolling feature is an embarrassment. Mozilla-based browsers are the only ones without decent smooth scrolling — compare with Opera and IE and the difference is striking.
Also why isn’t it turned on by default?
I’ve never really used smooth scrolling before because it just seems like excess animation to me. I’m guessing that it’s not enabled by default because enough people must not want it enabled.
I plan on switching over this weekend, should be interesting.
I want to return to firefox 3. How do I do that?