Yesterday Mozilla announced the build has reached BETA and is ready for the more cautious developer to start playing with it. Firefox 4.0 comes with lots of new bells and whistles, you can find a full feature list here, most notable the new UI design and enhancements in <hmtl5> and CSS3. There are also lots of new developer api’s for us to play with including websockets and local indexeddb’s.

If your already surfing the beta channel wave, you should be able to just “upgrade now” although my work machine didn’t find it so had to install it manually. Those of you running a stable realease or want to install manually can do so via the usual beta release channel.

For more information on please read the Mozilla Announcement on their blog.

The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.

A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.

The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.

There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.

If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.

For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.

For a while there has been an option in the config to display image place-holders while a page loads but not for broken images as on IE (yes I’m praising an IE feature!).

Image placeholders on load is set to ON by default, your can change this if you want by going to about:config and searching for ‘image’. The option your looking for is:

browser.display.show_image_placeholders

Just double click to change the value.

As I said before, this doesn’t affect broken images after the page has loaded, and after several searches it looks like the option just isn’t available to Fx users as a general setting. There is however a solution…

Firefox allows users to specify custom CSS to be applied to websites on a global basis, e.g if you want your default link colour on unvisited links to be black instead of the default blue.

You do this by making changes to your global content css file. You can find it at the following location (OS Specific – I’m on windows 7) ‘%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\chrome’ (if your on a domain you will need to edit it in your roaming folder), look for a file called ‘UserContent-example.css’ and rename it to ‘UserContent.css’, this will then be loaded by Firefox when it fires up.

Add the following CSS to the file and restart Firefox..
/* Enable image placeholders */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http), url-prefix(file) {
img:-moz-broken{
-moz-force-broken-image-icon:1;
width:24px;
height:24px;
}
}

Thats it… when you next come accross a broken/missing image, you will get a box the size you have defined in its place with the alt inside it.

Update:
I was asked if I could add a broken image in this post as an example to see the css tweak in action, so here it is -> <-

There are lots of great updates in this release and pretty much all add-ons are supported so I advise you all to update.
More details can be found at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/

While your at it, remember to upgrade to the latest version of Firefbug, there have been some great improvements in the net panel, improved timings etc and the html inspector has had a lot of updates made to it. More details can be found on http://getfirebug.com/

You can read more on the history of Mozilla Firefox on this wikipedia article.

Users of Twitter can show their support by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter profile picture

And everyone else can forward this link to friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and anyone else you meet on the street – http://getfirefox.com/ and help to make the web a better place

This latest build see’s imp0rovment over the supported screen resolutions which means on my TYTN II, I can finally use Fennec in portrait mode and also view the options screen So far development on the Windows Mobile build have only been officially supported on the HTC Touch Pro, this latest build now supports the resolution of pretty much all the Windows Mobile based phones of the last couple of years.

The biggest update in this release is noted as being the start-up time. Although to be honest I haven’t noticed any difference myself, there had also been the addition of tile caching, similar to Google Maps, in order to speedup the rendering of pages and cut down on the work Fennec must do, you can read more about the tile caching on Roy Frostig blog

The only downside I could find with this latest release is that the ability to zoom appears to have disappeared, double-clicking on the screen makes it flicker but nothing happens.

If you want to read more on this latest release, see the offical blog post, the release notes and better yet, download the cab installer.

Anyone riding the BETA channel can do a manual update to download ff3.5.3 otherwise you can download from here – http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.5.3-candidates/build1/

You can download Namoroka using the following links

• Windows: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: namoroka-3.6a1.tar.bz2

Mozilla have, as always, released a developer guide to the new features, for a full list of additions to Firefox 3.6 follow this link

Its written by Jeff Balogh, part of the Mozilla web development team
Link : http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/localstorage/

hacks.mozilla.org is a site full of guides and demo’s of the new features that can be found in Firefox 3.5

Developers should head on over to the developer notes if you’ve not read them already, there is also a blog that Mozilla have setup that explains the new features in more details, its called hacks.mozilla.org i would advise everyone has a quick look over it as there is a lot of useful stuff on there.

Want to know more?

Mozilla’s 3.5 announcement post can be found here

You can download Firefox 3.5 here

Or watch the tour below…

[pro-player width='530' height='253' type='video']http://videos.mozilla.org/firefox/3.5/meet/meet.mp4[/pro-player]

A lot of people dont know about these so thought I would also add a link to the Firefox Tips and Tricks