Mozilla's Firefox 3, Beta 4 faster, touts UI changes, Vista integration

Mozilla says that the fourth beta of its Firefox 3 browser is available to download with more than 900 enhancements, better handling of memory and interface tweaks for Vista.

According to Mozilla's developer site, Firefox 3 beta 4 includes the following (also see What's new document). Paula Rooney notes that the latest beta brings Firefox 3 closer to the finish line. Ed Burnette adds that Firefox 3 beta 4's best feature is that it's faster. Meanwhile, the early reaction (Techmeme) has been positive. Percy Caballo at Mozilla Links has a good first review.

Other key features:

• Improved memory usage. Mozilla says: "Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned."
• More personalization via an algorithm in the location bar that tracks site visit "visit recency and frequency." The aim: Better match URLs with your history and bookmarks. The algorithm adapts to your browsing habits.
• Better search support in the download manager.
• Full page zoom that allows you to scale layout, text and images.
• Integration with Vista and specific icons to go along with it. Integration with Mac OS and Linux too.
• Support for offline data storage for Web apps.
• Tweaks to the JavaScript engine. The optimization "resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions," says Mozilla.