We are excited to release the latest Firefox 4 Beta. This beta offers easier account and new device setup for Firefox Sync, expanded support for 3D graphics in the browser and a revamped Firefox Add-ons Manager.

Streamlined Firefox Sync Setup
Firefox 4 Beta now includes a streamlined Firefox Sync setup, making it easier to bring Awesome bar history, bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across your computers and smartphones. Based on your feedback, we’ve made it much easier to setup Firefox Sync while still securing your Firefox data with the same high-grade encryption. Ragavan Srinivasan, Project Manager for Firefox Sync, describes the new setup procedure for desktops, laptops, Android or Nokia Maemo phones and iPhones in more detail (and with videos!) in this blog post.

Increased Support for 3D Graphics
WebGL is an open standard for accelerated 3D graphic rendering on the Web that enables developers to build applications that until now required a user to install plug-ins. Firefox 4 Beta now supports WebGL for most modern built-in graphics cards, making it easier for developers to create interactive 3D games, vivid graphics and new visual experiences for the Web without the use of third-party plug-ins. For more information on WebGL, read this post from Principal Firefox Engineer Vlad Vukicevic.

Combined with our previous work to bring open HTML5 technologies for animation, video, and sound to the Web, developers can now create amazing experiences that are rendered directly in the browser, combining themselves with live data from the Internet. Watch the video of the “Flight of the Navigator” below, or better yet, try it on your computer (it requires a modern computer with recent graphics hardware). The live demo is rendered in your browser as you watch. As Professor and Mozilla Developer Dave Humphrey describes, this is not a video – it’s built using open technologies, pulls in data from Twitter and Flickr, and puts it all together as you watch.

Automatic Updates with new Firefox Add-ons Manager
The revamped Firefox Add-ons Manager is now available on Windows, Mac and Linux with an easy way to manage and discover add-ons to enhance and personalize your browsing experience. Now, add-ons update automatically with the Firefox Add-Ons Manager enables add-ons to update automatically so your add-ons are always up to date. For more information on the Firefox Add-ons Manager, see this blog post from Jennifer Boriss on the Firefox User Experience team.

Making Firefox Add-ons Compatible
We are working with the amazing community of add-ons developers to get the gallery of thousands of beneficial and fun add-ons ready to customize the features, look and functionality of Firefox 4 Beta. For more details on how to make your add-on compatible for Firefox 4, read this blog post from Firefox Add-ons Developer Relations Lead Jorge Villalobos.

Thank you to all our beta testers for all the help building and testing Firefox 4 Beta. Please keep the feedback coming. We love to hear from you and we couldn’t build Firefox 4 Beta without you.

For more information:

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• Short, to the point FAQ
• Long, technical release notes

Today we’re releasing an update to the Firefox 4 Beta to resolve two issues that have been causing problems for some of our testers:

• a stability issue on Windows,
• an issue with plugins on Mac OS X which made it difficult for users to type in some web pages, and showed white boxes over other web pages.

It’s thanks to our hundreds of thousands of beta testers and their continued feedback that we were able to identify, diagnose and address these issues. Existing beta users will be updated automatically, but of course we also welcome anyone to download the latest version from the beta website. Other than these bug fixes, today’s release has the same features and functionality as the previous beta update. The beta schedule hasn’t been impacted by this additional release, and we expect the next version of the beta in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Not convinced? Learn more about the features
• Got an opinion? Submit your feedback
• Short, to the point FAQ
• Long, technical release notes

The latest update to Firefox 4 Beta brings super fast graphics and incredible new audio capabilities to the Web. Firefox 4 Beta now leverages hardware acceleration to improve graphics performance for Windows users and also allows, for the first time, the visualization of audio data within the browser. If you haven’t already, you should download it for free, today!

Visualizing Sound
Until now, people haven’t had the ability to interact with sound on the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow. Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web. With this new API, developers can read and write raw audio data within the browser, presenting audio information in completely new ways that could allow, for example, for people to visually experience a speech or a song through Firefox. Professor and Mozilla Developer Dave Humphrey has a more detailed blog post, and offers this demonstration to illustrate the power of this new API:

Enjoy Faster Graphics
Firefox 4 Beta now takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve graphics performance. On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive websites, giving more power to the Web. To learn more, read Bas Schouten’s blog post or Paul Rouget’s blog post and check out this demo:

More Secure Connections
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a new security protocol in Firefox 4 Beta that allows websites to insist that Firefox always use secured connections. Firefox 4 Beta now remembers what sites use the HSTS protocol and will only connect to those sites using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the future, helping to prevent “man in the middle” attacks. For more details, please read this blog post from Sid Stamm of the Mozilla Security team.

The Feedback program we launched in our first beta continues to be an incredible tool that allows our users to help us understand what they are liking most about the upcoming Firefox 4. We wouldn’t be able to make the progress we have without this vital feedback from the community of beta testers. Check out the Input page to see what people are experiencing in Firefox 4 Beta.

As always, Firefox 4 Beta testers will continue to receive automatic updates, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• Short, to the point FAQ
• Long, technical release notes

The latest update to Firefox 4 Beta is now available with new features that offer more control over your Web experience. This release lets you own and control your personal Web experience by syncing your data across devices, and by helping you organize your tabs in order to juggle and prioritize your busy online life.

What new features are in this Firefox 4 Beta update?

Stay in Sync
Fire ​fox ​Sync​ makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible across multiple computers and mobile devices. Now, with Firefox Sync, you can customize and take your Web experiences with you anywhere, even on your iPhone with Firefox Home.

Firefox Sync encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server and does not track your travels throughout the Web. This means that you never have to compromise your privacy for the convenience of using Firefox Sync.

When downloading or updating to the latest version of the Firefox 4 beta, you will automatically be prompted to create a Firefox Sync account. You can watch this video for a step-by-step guide:

Visit the Firefox Sync page for more information on how to use Firefox Sync. For an engineer’s perspective, see Mike Connor’s post.

A Tab Revolution
When tabs were first introduced, the feature changed the way people browse the Web. To continue the tab revolution, the beta now includes Firefox Panorama (formerly Tab Candy) as a new approach to tab management that makes it easy to organize and multi-task while on the Web. If you juggle many open tabs for work, shopping, music, social sites, vacation planning and more, you can easily group and prioritize those tabs any way you want. With one keystroke you can see an overview of all tabs to quickly locate and switch between tabs or groups of tabs.

See Aza Raskin’s blog post for more details.

Better feedback, a better browser
As always, Firefox 4 Beta includes a Feedback Add-on with Mozilla Labs Test Pilot, which enable you to take part in anonymous studies. You can choose to opt-out of any or all studies by managing your settings in the Feedback button.

We value feedback from our beta testers and ask for continued feedback on Firefox 4 Beta. The feedback is used to help improve future Firefox Beta releases.

Firefox 4 Beta testers will receive automatic updates, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• FAQ
• Get the detailed Release Notes

The latest update of Firefox 4 Beta is now available for download and testing in more than 30 languages, adding 10 new languages. This update includes multi-touch support for Windows 7 and new JavaScript values to experience faster and smoother graphics. We also have vital feedback from our testers that we will incorporate into future updates.

More details on the cool new features for Web developers in this Firefox 4 Beta update:

Multi-touch
Firefox 4 Beta now has multi-touch support for Windows 7 to enable people to
interact with Web content with their hands naturally. Developers can use multi-touch capabilities to leverage touch-enabled devices and provide people with an intuitive and fun browsing experience. For more details, see the blog posts by Paul Rouget and Felipe Gomes.

New JavaScript Values
Changes to the C++ representation of JavaScript enable Firefox to execute heavy, numeric code more efficiently. This sort of code is used to produce smooth, streamlined graphics in modern Web applications. For more details, see Rob Sayre’s blog post.

Firefox 4 Beta includes a Feedback Add-on with Mozilla Labs Test Pilot, which will ask you to take part in anonymous studies. You can choose to opt-out of any or all studies and manage your settings in the Feedback button. The feedback is used to help us improve future Firefox Beta releases. See Mike Beltzner’s blog post for more details.

The Feedback tool has been a great success, and our half-million testers submit approximately 3,500 pieces of feedback every day. Test Pilot recently conducted a survey of Firefox 4 Beta testers to help us better understand the dedicated testers who have been giving us this fantastic feedback. We discovered that our beta users are primarily men who use the Web between two and six hours each day, mostly for entertainment and communication. This doesn’t come as a surprise to us, but it also isn’t a great representation of Internet users. We need your help! If you’re enjoying using the Firefox 4 Beta, tell your friends, get them set up and don’t forget to point out the Feedback button.

Firefox 4 Beta testers will receive automatic updates, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• FAQ
• Get the detailed Release Notes

Guten Tag! 你好! Cześć! Olá! Привет! Bonjour! Γεια σας! Hello!

The new update of Firefox 4 Beta is now available in 23 languages for testing and feedback. Thanks to the help of the global Mozilla community, we’re now able to bring Firefox 4 Beta to more people around the world. This update to Firefox 4 Beta continues with changes to the look of Firefox with tabs appearing on the top of the browser and introduces the ability to turn tabs into App Tabs.

What’s new in this Firefox 4 Beta update?

Continued Evolution of the New Firefox Look – Tabs on Top

• Mac and Windows users now have all their tabs on the top of the browser. We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the Web content and easier to control the tools in your Web browser.
• If you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the Menu bar is replaced with a single Firefox button so you get to the most used options with just one click.

App Tabs

• There are some websites you visit many times throughout your day, such as your email, social networks, music or game sites. Now you can turn the websites you use most into App Tabs to easily find the ones you need.
• App Tabs offer a better way to manage tabs, saving space on the tab bar and making it easy to find frequently used tabs. Check out this video from Alex Faaborg for more details on App Tabs.

New for Developers: Under the Hood

CSS3 Transitions:

• The Firefox 4 Beta now has support for new CSS3 features like Transitions and Transformations, making it fun to add elegant animations to your websites.
• To show what CSS3 Transitions can do, we added them to the Firefox 4 Beta “What’s New” page. For more information, check out this post and demo from Paul Roget.

Retained Layers:

• Adding Retained Layers in Firefox 4 Beta allows for super-fast scrolling on complex websites. See Robert O’Callahan’s post for more information.

XPCOM Framework:

• We made changes to the XPCOM framework that improves start up time when you load Firefox. See Jorge Villalobos post for more information.

There are more features to come in future Firefox 4 Beta updates and we need your help to test them. Already with help from our community of testers, we were able to get valuable feedback on the first Firefox 4 Beta that enabled us to fix more than 670 issues in this update.

Help build the best Firefox ever!

Firefox 4 Beta includes a new Feedback Add-on so at any time you can click the Feedback button to tell us about what you do or don’t like. The Feedback Add-on includes Mozilla Labs Test Pilot, and will ask you to take part in anonymous studies. The latest Test Pilot study explores the ways people interact with the Firefox menu bar, Firefox button (on Windows Vista and 7) and toolbar controls. You can choose to opt-out of any or all studies and manage your settings in the Feedback button (no data will be sent to Mozilla without your permission).

Testers will receive automatic updates to the Firefox 4 Beta, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• FAQ
• Get the detailed Release Notes

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks. Your feedback is essential to help shape the product which is why we’re launching now to hear from you early in our development process.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 includes dozens of major features and improvements – by testing them early we’ll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions of Firefox. Once you download Firefox 4 Beta 1, you’re part of our beta program and will receive regular updates as more features launch.

If you are using a Windows PC, the most noticeable new feature will be the look of the browser. We moved the tabs to the top to make it easier to focus on the web content and easier to control the tools in your Web browser. Also, if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista the Menu bar was replaced with a single Firefox button so you can get to the most used options with just one click. These changes will be coming soon for Mac and Linux.

There is a lot more to this beta than a facelift on Windows, including:

• New Add-Ons Manager: gives you more space to manage your Add-Ons, Themes and Plugins. Customizing your browser has never been easier!
• HD Video: Watch hardware-accelerated, super-smooth, HD-quality HTML5 video on YouTube using the new WebM format.
• Privacy improvements: Mozilla always puts privacy first, and this latest beta fixes flaws in some Web standards that could expose your browser history.
• Crash Protection: Experience uninterrupted browsing (now available on all platforms) – when a plugin crashes or freezes, you can resume browsing by simply refreshing the page.
• Performance: We know that performance is important. In this version, we focused on improving responsiveness at start-up and during page loads. This is just the beginning for performance improvements in Firefox 4.

Web developers will be interested in some of the changes we’ve made under the hood:

• HTML5 Parser: Run the best Web apps of today and tomorrow – if a user’s browser doesn’t support HTML5, they still won’t miss out on your content.
• WebSockets: Build real-time, online interactions like gaming and chatting.
• IndexedDB: Use structured storage in your Web applications to speed them up or provide offline support.
• Web Console: Peek into dynamic websites with this experimental “Heads Up Display” analysis tool.
• Simpler Add-On Development: Authors can create Add-Ons that don’t require a restart to install, develop their Add-Ons more quickly using the new powerful Jetpack SDK, and safely connect to existing libraries using js-ctypes.
• For a full list of Web technologies supported by Firefox check out  our “big chart o’ features.”

There will be much more to test in future beta releases and not everything that you see in this beta is guaranteed to be in Firefox 4. That’s why we need your feedback to help shape Firefox 4. To make it easier to give feedback, Firefox 4 Beta includes a new Feedback Add-On. Any time you run across something you like or don’t like, just click the Feedback button and tell us about it.  The Add-On also includes Mozilla Labs’ Test Pilot , and will ask you to take part in anonymous studies.  You can choose to opt-out of any or all studies by managing your settings in the Feedback button (no data will be sent to Mozilla without your permission).

Help build the best Firefox ever:

• Download Firefox 4 Beta
• Learn more about the features
• Submit your feedback
• FAQ
• Get the detailed Release Notes

We want to thank the Mozilla community of nightly testers for the amazing feedback that helped shaped Firefox 4 Beta 1. We appreciate your assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox.

Today, we launched an update to our crash protection feature to extend the amount of time Firefox will wait before terminating unresponsive plugins.

The crash protection feature, first introduced in Firefox 3.6.4, protects Windows and Linux users from crashes and freezes caused by third party plugins such as Flash and Silverlight. When a plugin crashes, users can reload the Web page to restart the plugin and continue browsing. When a plugin freezes, making the whole browser unresponsive, Firefox 3.6.4 terminates the unresponsive plugin after waiting 10 seconds. These changes were tested with a beta audience of close to one million users.

Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plugins, especially with games. For these users the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short. To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plugin to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds. This change has been made in Firefox 3.6.6, which was released today as an automatic update for all users.

We would like to thank vendors, such as Zynga, for working with us to ensure that Firefox continues to provide the best user experience for our shared users. For more information, please see:

• Crash Protection FAQ
• Firefox 3.6.6 Release Notes
• Mozilla Support
• Plugin Check

Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.

Results from our beta testing show Firefox 3.6.4 will significantly reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games. When a plugin crashes or freezes while using Firefox, users can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simply refreshing the page.

Mozilla recognizes that third-party plugins provide important functionality in many of today’s websites. At the same time, plugins can lead to problems for users as they browse. With the ability to automatically alert users when they have out of date plugins, and now crash protection, Firefox 3.6.4 allows users to experience all the content they love without any of the hassles. (If you’re not running Firefox, Mozilla recommends that you make a habit of visiting the Plugin Check page to keep your plugins up to date.)

At this time Firefox offers crash protection for Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight on Windows and Linux computers. Support for other plugins and operating systems will become available in a future Firefox release.

All Firefox users are encouraged to upgrade for free by using the “Check for Updates” function in the Help menu, or by visiting www.firefox.com. For more information, please visit:

• Crash Protection FAQ
• Firefox 3.6.4 Release Notes
• Plugin Check