Firefox 4 beta 4 out today, feature complete beta 6 slated for Sept 10

The Mozilla team released the fourth beta of Firefox 4 today but don't expect feature freeze code until September.

According to meeting notes posted today, the team aims to release beta 5 this Friday and is aiming to post the feature-frozen beta 6 on September 10.

The project -- which held its weekly meeting here today -- will consider adding new features until August 27 but the intent is to wrap up work on the three core elements for Firefox 4: delivering high performance, a compelling user experience to drive upgrades and JetPack SDK, which is the SDK that allows developers to use advanced web technologies to create Firefox add-ons.

Those three priorities have been addressed but some of the other code developed since 3.6 may be moved to 4.1 or 4.5 to enable a speedy delivery of version 4.

"Beyond those three things, nothing can make us delay Firefox 4 any longer than we have to," said one lead Mozilla developer on the call, who added that there are tons of new features in Firefox 4 that will make it a strong rival to forthcoming competitors IE9 and Chrome 5. "It'll be a huge step for us."

Hardware acceleration is expected to be on by default by beta 5.