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Friday, December 24, 2010

Mozilla Firefox 4: New Betas For Desktop PC and Android Mobiles

           Mozilla Firefox 4.0 is now in beta 8 stage for PC operating systems, and beta 3 stage for the Android mobile OS. While it already has considerable momentum on the PC (desktops/laptops), we are particularly waiting to see the impact it makes on the mobile platform. As a freeware app, and being one that is already well-recognized, Firefox has the potential of taking a majority market-share as a web browser, on an OS that is fast growing in user numbers.

 Availability of Firefox on mobile is pretty much restricted only to Nokia's Maemo (N900) and Google's Android OS (2.0 and above). Both are Linux operating systems in essence, running on non-x86 processors. Firefox browser for the PC on the other hand, is available to many x86-based operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD.

The desktop version of the browser, Firefox 4.0 beta 8, brings new features - some of the top ones are listed below:
- Visual overview of all open tabs, for sorting/grouping.
- Improved Firefox Sync, meant for desktop and mobile devices.
- HTML5 support, including WebM video format.
- Hardware acceleration (via GPU) for some rendering operations.
- JägerMonkey, a new, faster JavaScript engine.
This is scheduled to be the last beta, before the final/stable version releases in early 2011.

Firefox 4.0 beta 3 for mobile (formerly codenamed Fennec) brings these features among others:
- Firefox Sync feature built-in.
- Add-ons (somewhat like extensions).
- Option to "Save as PDF".
- Password Manager.
- Support for Android-style menus and keyboards.
- Support for uploading files.
- Supports playing video in Full-screen.
- The "Awesome Bar" and "Awesome Screen".
You can download Firefox Beta for mobile, either through scanning QR code or install by browsing to the mobile site directly using Android's default mobile browser.

source: mozilla Mobile

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