onprogress.net

Firefox 4 Beta Overview ¶

As a release of Fire­fox 4 Beta 9 approaches, Christo­pher Bliz­zard gives us an overview of what to expect. It is a nice laun­dry list of every­thing Fire­fox 4 will deliver when it is finally shipped to the gen­eral public.

Christopher’s list doesn’t quite sep­a­rate what is new in Beta 9 though, but my under­stand­ing is that this release includes a num­ber of updates to their HTML5 pars­ing & ren­der­ing by imple­ment­ing more of what was once-known as Web Forms 2, <video> pre­load­ing and buffer­ing sup­port fixes, and some fixes to push­State and replaceS­tate.

In addi­tion WebGL is now enabled by default, join­ing Chromium in an exclu­sive club of awe­some. Opera and Inter­net Explorer have yet to ship a WebGL imple­men­ta­tion but I sus­pect Opera isn’t far behind. Opera had pre­vi­ously shipped an imple­men­ta­tion of WebGL’s lit­tle brother known then as 3D <canvas> in a Labs build a few years ago.