The latest Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta is now available to download and test. This release delivers improved performance and responsiveness when watching videos on your favorite video websites. We are in the final stages of the Firefox 4 Beta cycle. The team has fixed more than 7,000 bugs since the first beta release.
We are working closely with the community of add-on developers to ensure their Firefox Add-ons are ready to customize the features, look and functionality of Firefox 4 Beta. For more details on how to make your add-ons compatible with Firefox 4 Beta, read this blog post from Firefox Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Jorge Villalobos.
We couldn’t build Firefox 4 Beta without the help of our millions of beta testers and their feedback, which we welcome as we work to deliver an awesome experience to the more than 400 million Firefox users worldwide.
The latest Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo is now available from the Android Market and on your Nokia Maemo device. This release was focused on continuing to improve stability and performance.
Firefox 4 Beta is faster and easier to use. You’ll experience better responsiveness to panning and zooming, faster start up time and with enhanced JavaScript performance you’ll see faster page load times. We also worked to make major stability improvements in this release.
Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo delivers the Firefox experience to mobile devices, complete with the performance and customization users expect. It includes features like Firefox Sync, Awesome Screen, tabbed browsing and Firefox Add-ons, to create a personalized and effortless mobile browsing experience.
Now is the time to develop Firefox Add-ons for mobile, including restartless add-ons! Developers can use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps for Firefox users worldwide.
We’ve made great improvements based on your feedback. Please continue to give us feedback to help make Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo awesome.
Give feedback – Tap on Give Feedback on the Firefox for mobile Start page
Get Help – Ask a question and get answers with Firefox for mobile Support
See the release notes for a full list of features, updates and improvements included in this release.
The latest Firefox 4 Beta is now available to download and test. We’ve continued our work to improve performance and stability, while also implementing a “Do Not Track” privacy feature to provide more control over online behavioral tracking.
The Web is evolving quickly and so are the ways that your data is collected, shared and stored. With the integration of the “Do Not Track” option into Firefox 4 Beta, you can now check a “Do Not Track” box in the “Advanced” screen of Firefox’s Options. When this option is selected, a header will be sent signaling to websites that you wish to opt-out of online behavioral tracking. You will not notice any difference in your browsing experience until sites and advertisers start responding to the header.
You can read more about behavioral tracking in this post from Mozilla Privacy Lead, Alex Fowler. For more information about the technical implementation Do Not Track, check out this post from Sid Stamm, Mozilla security and privacy engineer.
We couldn’t do this without the help of our millions of beta testers and their feedback, which we welcome as we continue to improve and polish Firefox 4 Beta to ensure we deliver an awesome experience to our 400 million users around the world.
For the next three years, we will have the opportunity to engage a huge community, bring people together for trainings and in-person events, and ultimately build software to address the challenges facing news organizations.
We’ll be working with some amazing news partners: the BBC, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Zeit Online, who are launching the partnership with us, and many more that we will invite to join the initiative.
Mozilla is moving beyond software, looking for ways to bring open technologies and culture into new areas like art, media and education. We recently sponsored the Open Web Award as part of the Transmediale art festival in Berlin, Germany, combining digital art and the open web. With our new Mozilla Drumbeat initiative, we are engaging creators globally to shape the future of the web.
We were really excited to see more than 100 submissions for the Transmediale Open Web Award. The jury narrowed it down to three great contributions that all show potential, and could be seeds for incredibly exciting developments for art and the web in the coming years.
Jesse Scott (Graffiti Research Labs), center, accepts Open Web Award in Berlin on behalf of Evan Roth from Mark Surman and Henrik Moltke (Mozilla).
The winner – Graffiti Markup Language – enables the capture of graffiti motion data and turns it into something that can be shared and manipulated indefinitely. One can imagine not only great and exciting graffiti art but all kinds of motion expression. Just like the web itself potential of GML is totally open ended. Like LEGO, anyone can built whatever they want with it. For Mozilla, GML also has great educational value because it explains open data and standards in a surprising and fresh way to new people. We congratulate Evan Roth and the GML community on winning the award. Jesse Scott from Graffiti Research Labs in Berlin accepted on behalf on Evan Roth.
We also want to award a distinction to the other two finalists, Booki and Thimbl. Like GML, they represent exciting opportunities for creative expression on the web.
We are excited to release the latest Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo. You can get Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta from the Android Market to test on your Google Android device or go here to get Firefox 4 Beta on your Nokia Maemo device. This release is the fastest performing Firefox 4 Beta for mobile yet. You will notice faster start-up, page load times and responsiveness to panning and zooming. The Firefox Mobile Add-ons Gallery also offers more than 100 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of your Web experience.
You can watch this video to see some of the popular Firefox 4 Beta for mobile features in action.
In response to valuable feedback from the previous beta, this release greatly enhances performance. Our recent tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8. Everything from start-up time and page load time to responsiveness and panning and zooming are snappy in this release. Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues.
Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo delivers the Firefox experience, complete with performance, customization and security users expect, to mobile devices. Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is built on the same technology platform as Firefox 4 for the desktop, optimized for browsing on a mobile device. It includes features like Firefox Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Screen, to give users a personalized and effortless mobile browsing experience. Firefox Sync is integrated into Firefox 4 Beta to synchronize history, bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form data across multiple computers and mobile devices, delivering one seamless Web experience with minimal typing.
The growing Mobile Add-ons Gallery offers more than 100 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of Firefox. Developers can now create mobile add-ons for Firefox that allow a user easily install and use that add-on without the need to restart their browser. With Firefox 4 Beta for mobile, developers can use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach millions of people. Firefox 4 Beta already has many useful mobile add-ons to choose from and we can’t wait to see what developers build next.
We were able to accomplish many great additions and improvements in this release thanks to the feedback from our beta testers. As we continue to work on adding features and enhancing performance, we need help from our beta testers to build the best Firefox.
Give feedback – Tap on Give Feedback on the Firefox for mobile Start page
Get Help – Ask a question and get answers with Firefox for mobile Support
See the release notes for a full list of features, updates and improvements included in this release.
