Mozilla To Release Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 on Friday

From: Conceivably Tech - July 20, 2010

Mozilla appears to be on track to deliver the second beta of Firefox 4.0 by the end of this week. Beta 2 will be focusing mostly on bugfixes and is showing about 33% less crashes than the first beta. Five more betas are planned to follow until the beginning of October. For those who don’t trust beta versions, Mozilla released a security update for the stable version of Firefox: Version 3.6.7 plugs security holes just in time for Blackhat.



The first beta of Firefox 4.0 was released on July 6 and missed its target release, but it seems that Beta 2 is well on track to be released on time. Mozilla closed the code for the release late last night and is now expected to publish the official version of the beta this Friday, July 23. Don’t expect many new features and performance improvements, but a much more stable browser. According to Mozilla’s crash report, the current pre-release beta 2 has less than four daily crashes on average per user per day, while Beta 1 shows almost 6 average daily crashes per user.

On the stable side, Mozilla wanted to push out Firefox 3.6.7 in time to protect the browser from bad news during the hacker conference Blackhat, which will open on July 28. 14 security holes were fixed over Firefox 3.6.6.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 is planned to be only the second beta in a string of seven beta versions of the new browser. The first build of the beta browser is expected to become available sometime later today and the QA is expected to be finalized on July 22. A final beta build should be available on July 22 or 23, if Mozilla can keep its schedule. Beta 3 is scheduled for August 6, Beta 4 for August 20, Beta 5 for September 6, Beta 6 September 17 and Beta 7 for October 1. The code freeze for the final version is targeted for October 15. RC1 should arrive in late October, according to this schedule.

The big question, of course, is when Mozilla will be able to integrate its new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine into Firefox. The new engine is already faster than the current TraceMonkey in the V8 benchmark and is approaching TraceMonkey performance in Sunspider. According to the most recent published data, TraceMonkey finishes the test in 715.8 ms on Mozilla’s test system, while JaegerMonkey stands at 754.5 ms – which is still well behind Mozilla’s previously stated goal of 500 ms and its renewed goal to beat its rivals, which are close to 300 ms.

The JaegerMonkey team said that it is making good progress and is now about three times faster than the baseline interpreter of the engine, which was first discussed in May of this year. According to Mozilla, JaegerMonkey still needs to improve in regular expressions (which are the focus of most JavaScript benchmarks), strings and function calls. At this time, the team is working on about 30 bugs that affect JavaScript performance.

Update: The first candidate build of Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 was released late Tuesday.

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Looking forward to it.

The initial beta is freezing up on me on certain web pages. It comes out of it by itself, but it lasts upward to a full minute or longer. This is the first and only time I've had anything like this happen. Using the 3.x.x version instead (since they both are installed and use the same configuration from user folder) does not exhibit the problem.

I'm looking forward to it too, I hope that more add ons are supported, in particular, Better Privacy. It deletes tracking cookies upon closing the browser. And I can confirm the freeze issue, although it doesn't happen often.

I was used to the other look of the browser for so long, this one is taking time getting used to. Glad that we have plenty of time!

Well, it looks like the release won't be until Friday July 29, 2010

See attached tentative release schedule:

New Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 installed here. You can update using the program itself now, guys.

Thanks, I just updated it on my notebook, too. They are moving along. Hopefully, I can soon use it as my main browser. This new look takes some adjusting to.

I will pass thanks. IE is absolutely fine for me, and opens virtually simultaneously. I tried Firefox and also thunderbird, and abandoned them both some time ago.