Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be released on time

June 3, 2009 Software Review

The Mozilla Foundation said that they are still on track to release Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 sometime later this week firefox_by_nerdboy550 regardless of the lack of a firm release date.

Beta 4 will most probably be the last test version before Mozilla moves on to the release candidate of Firefox 3.5. Mozilla has not done very well with Firefox 3.5′s deadlines. Mozilla delayed the release of Beta 3 twice earlier this year, before moving onto Beta 4, as well as dumping the name Firefox 3.1 for the Firefox 3.5 to reflect the differences between versions 3.0 and 3.5.

The previous delays were from Firefox’s new JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey. There were promises made to speed up page loads two times faster than
Firefox 3.0, and nine times faster than Firefox 2.0. At present, Beta 4 contains seven high-priority bugs requiring fixes, five of which involve the JavaScript engine.

More specific features include:

Capability to drag and drop elements within and among Websites.
Wi-Fi based geo-location (opt-in feature).
Audio and video elements that free media from being dependent on plug-ins, and give Web developers greater control over how medial will appear on a Web page.
Downloadable fonts so pages look exactly as the designer intended.
One-click deletion for specific Websites: similar to private browsing, right clicking and selecting “forget about this” for any Website in Firefox’s Web history will delete history records relating to that Website.
Private browsing feature that prevents Firefox from recording your Web activities.

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.9 update with 12 security fixes, four of which were important. This update was the largest security patch for Firefox since December 2008, but the second security update in the last four weeks.