Mozilla has finally released last Friday of what’s most likely to be the final test build of the next iteration of Firefox browser. With the final date is drawing near, only several new features are incorporated into Firefox 4.
One of the overhaul is on bookmarks and history code that is claimed to have improved in term of performance and speed. This latest build also has “per-compartment garbage collection” enabled to reduce work load when rendering complex animations
Even though it is coming to the final phase there are few bugs that are not yet properly addressed. The new tab sorting interface (Panorama) still have some glitches and need to be fixed. Among other problems that are gathered from user feedbacks are US video website Hulu.com is blocked in beta version and it is reported that Twitter is barely accessible especially when entering text on the website. Scrolling in Gmail window also appears a bit sluggish for some people.
A final Firefox 4 will come with additional hardware acceleration, JaegerMonkey Javascript engine extension and will also allow coders to build plug-in-free 3D graphics via WebGL.
Currently, Mozilla is working around the clock to reduce bugs to zero before coming up with the Release Candidate (RC) version of Firefox 4, which should arrive early February 2011.