Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 Now Available For Testing

The Mozilla Community on Monday released the Beta 4 of its Firefox 3.5 Internet browser, which has been under development for the last 10 months.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 can be downloaded in any of 70 languages by clicking here.

New with Firefox 3.5 is a private browsing mode, also known as the "porn mode," which gives users the opportunity to browse the Internet without retaining any data related to which sites and pages were visited.

Also new is TraceMonkey, which adds native-code compilation to Mozilla's JavaScript engine to increase the speed of both the browser chrome and Web page content, thereby increasing the speed of Web applications. Mozilla is inviting beta testers to continue to try TraceMonkey and provide fixes for any hacks they find.

The browser now also includes a geolocation feature, which allows a Web site to know physically where the user is located in order to make more relevant information available or help save time during searches.

Should users wish to use the optional capability, Firefox looks for relevant location markers such as location data in a GPS device, the signal strength of nearby wireless hot spots and cellular towers and/or a computer's IP address. Firefox does not track the user, but instead provides location information to a Web site via an encrypted SSL connection.

The latest beta also includes support for new Web technologies that help maintain a consistent user experience regardless of type of device used to browse the Internet.

These include HTML5 for video and audio elements, downloadable fonts, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications and SVG (scalable vector graphics) transformation for 2-D graphics and graphical applications in XML.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 runs on Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista; Mac OS X 10.4 and later; and on various Linux distributions that have GTK+ 2.10 or higher, GLib 2.12 or higher, Pango 1.14 or higher and X.Org 1.0 or higher.