Firefox 4 Release candidate (beta) released

This is live from the official beta version of Firefox 4.0 Release Candidate now available for download. If youve never tried firefox 4 beta 11 or 12,  you definitely should try this one. Download Firefox 4.0 Release candidate 1

Mozilla Firefox Addon manager.

Rocking my Firefox is still easy at the moment with the help of the Compatibility reporter
(Mozilla's add-on tester which lets you install any .XPI you want), most of my extensions still work and Greasemonkey is running super smooth. Even the ChaCha guide toolbar still works. there's only one extension I really care about that's not working right now and that's Wikilook. Wikilook pulls up the Wikipedia article of a word or link i select or hover over inside a little bubble so i don't have to go to the Page to view the first part of the article (cause that's what i usually want). everything else seems to be working great although i had to make minor modifications to the UI in order to make it the way it should be. I had to bring the panorama button back into the tabbar. and i had to closes the Addon bar which took me about 10 seconds total to see and correct both of them. Addons that slowed me down before, hardly even make a difference anymore. Yoono, Stumbleupon, and other performance gluttons run excellent under Firefox 4. there is almost no difference in Performance and a one second increase in startup time with them enabled. (compare to the 10 second increase in startup for 3.6.15 and major performance issues with some of them enabled.)

Its running epically smooth there is no more printing error and most of my addons still work.
including Fire gestures, Every persona ever, Flagfox, Fastestfox, Stumbleupon, Yoono, ChaCha Guide toolbar, the precious greasemonkey, Screengrab, AdBlock Plus, and Xmarks.

FFixer Picture viewer.

Greasemonkey is working like a charm and I didn't have to reinstall it for 4.0 compatibility which means all my user scripts from my wikipedia like button to my FFixer Facebook fixer and Better Facebook are still working smoothly like always.

Firefox Tab management: note the arrows for scrolling and the expand and panorama buttons.

when i have too many tabs open my app tabs dont hide themselves like in opera unlike in google chrome and my Apptabs are always visible in any of what i like to call "Firefox's Virtual windows". and if you dont want them showing you can use true windows also. and unlike google chrome i can use tab groups (firefox's virtual windows)  to manage how many tabs are on screen. also unlike google chrome When there is an excess of tabs on the screen I dont have to just look at the Favicon of each tab(it will show some text and the favicon) it will scroll the tabs if you would like. or if you dont want to scroll through just use the expand arrow next to the + button and it will show you all of your tabs in a nice Windows classic like list. No other browser has all of these tab management options and for the moment none of them will for at least a few months (if opera does it) or 5 if Chrome does it as it is not in the 3 months away from stable dev release yet. so as of now Firefox is leading tab management with Opera in second.  and chrome or IE in third.

If no more major bugs are discovered that take some time to fix Firefox will pass the QA tests (quality assurance) and will be released around the middle of march and major development will finally start on the fast tracked Future of Firefox.

Born of Prism, the potential Site specific window

site specific Twitter menu

Firefox 5, due by june, promises if they are ready site specific browsing(http://areweprettyyet.com/5/desktopApps/#),  a new addon updater,  windows 64 bit support(which was pushed to 5 because it wasnt ready), performance improvements, and  and most importantly a more beautiful refined user interface. Firefox 4 will usher in a Format for release where firefox releases 4 times a year.  this would mean Firefox should be in Version 7 by year end.

Firefox menu in Site Specific window

Firefox has never experienced a fast track release program like Chrome has so it will be interesting if they can deliver on this promise of  doubling the number of releases by mid 2012. but it seems likely that it is not impossible because of the small number of Changes per release instead of hundreds it looks like they are aiming for dozens. If Small scale/Short term beta's(like chrome's beta program) are used instead of the massive long term million people beta that 4 has used. now that we have switched to the short term beta program model, it should be easy to get these features tested and running.

Firefox 5 is out of the concept stage and is moving into the development stage so we should see it go into Developer/beta testing soon. possibly by months end.

this development cycle change is great. it should allow the most capable browser out on the market today to continue to evolve and stay modern(and hopefully continue to bring IE down. i want IE to be down to 25% browser usage). It may not be the most feature rich browser out of the box but it certainly can do almost anything you can imagine and today it's the most efficient at adding these features with its great new way of incorporating extentions.

oh and google keep on paying for the firefox development please it couldn't be possible without your "search royalties" to the mozilla foundation. which funds everything from the development of new technologies through mozilla labs to the development of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey.