FireFox 4 Beta 8 Released

The latest official beta of Firefox 4 has been released by the Mozilla development team responsible for the web browser.

Do not expect lots of new features or changes in this beta or coming betas. The team has already stated that Firefox 4 is feature complete which means there will only be changes to the design, and of course bug fixes, loads of them.

The Firefox Sync setup experience has been greatly improved across desktop and mobile devices
Speed, functionality, and compatibility improvements to WebGL
Additional polish for the Firefox Add-ons Manager

Reads the release log. Not a lot to go by to be honest. The interesting part begins below the changes in beta 8, the overall features that have been added to Firefox 4 so far.

A long list, some highlights include:

• Uses JagerMonkey, a new, faster JavaScript engine, JavaScript speed improvements
• Certain rendering operations are now hardware-accelerated
• Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system
• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• Support for many HTML5 controls and features

There are also controversial features like Panorama or the removal of the status bar and the replacement of it with the add-on bar, or the display of link destinations in the address bar and not the new add-on bar.

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