Firefox 4.0 Beta Candidate Available

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla quietly posted the first beta build of its Firefox 4 browser early this morning. The 'Chromified' browser leaves a solid first impression with a few minor hiccups, but no surprises. If you have been using a previous version of Firefox 3.7, which now officially becomes Firefox 4.0, you should already feel comfortable with this new version. Mozilla has not posted detailed release notes yet, but there seem to be no major changes from Firefox 3.7a6-pre, with the exception that the browser is running more smoothly and with fewer crashes." Update: 06/29 18:40 GMT by S : Mozilla's Asa Dotzler writes, "Mozilla has not shipped Firefox 4 beta yet. We are in the process of making and testing the final set of changes, but we're not quite there yet." Changed headline to reflect this.

Comments

It is still quite slow and needs some trimming..

[LLKrisJ]

...of excess bloat.

But there currently is no single browser without it's shortcomings really...

Memory Utilization on Windows

[skrowl]

Right now I have MORE tabs open on firefox than I do on Chome. Firefox is using ~220MB private bytes, Chrome is using ... *adds up the 10 freaking processes*... 640MB (651MB if you count the googletalkplugin.exe).

This is OK on my development machine here, because I have 8GB, but I could see where someone with only 1-2GB might not like Chrome. It would constantly cause paging.