An official announcement from Mozilla has yet to make its way to the official beta site, but we can report that Mozilla have selected the 3rd build candidate as beta 4.
There will be one final beta version in September, before Mozilla signs off on Firefox 4 which is scheduled to arrive in October.
This version includes “Tab Groups” which has been renamed from Tab Candy, it allows you to group specific tabs into groups, for example: work, fun and anything else you could think of. The feature can now be accessed with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Space.
Direct2D rendering is still not activated by default on Windows, because as revealed last week Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, sent a tweet stating “b4 won’t have D2D on by default after all; just not quite ready to send it to that many users. soon!”
Update: Beta 4 is now up on the official Mozilla Beta page, grab from the link below
Download: Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 4 ~9 MB | Multiple languages & systems
Changelog: Release Notes
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Originally scheduled for August 20, the latest beta of Firefox was pushed forward for a release yesterday, on the 23rd; but two “blocker” bugs have since thrown yet another spanner in the works for the browser which has been drastically overhauled from earlier versions. With no fresh announcement on when the build will finally be made available, one has to assume that it will go live “when it’s done”, hinting at an almost imminent release.
The two bugs, of which one is marked major, affect both Windows & Linux respectively. The Windows bug, “Cannot change Character Encoding from Firefox Menu Button“, is described as normal and can affect the ability of Firefox to detect page encoding correctly; while the Linux bug, described as major, is described as “Dead accessible objects should not be present in the hierarchy” which points to rendering issues on websites from within Linux.
A major goal for Mozilla for their next browser is speed. Enabling Direct2D hardware acceleration helps with the display of text and graphics, which if you follow the Internet Explorer 9 previews, Microsoft is already touting that feature and the speed of their next browser. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, sent a tweet stating “b4 won’t have D2D on by default after all; just not quite ready to send it to that many users. soon!”
Mozilla also has the goal of ultimate user friendliness by implementing tab sets, or as it was called early on, tab candy. Tab sets allow you to group your tabs together into different sets, such as “Work”, “Research”, “School”, “Home”, or anything you wish.
Firefox users will be able to look forward to one more beta after this which should be the last with new features. That beta will also consist of bug fixes that Mozilla has found along the way.
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Microsoft announced a beta for the next generation of Microsoft Security Essentials today.
Available immediately, the new version includes a new protection engine and inspection system. The beta version includes the following features:
- Windows Firewall integration – During setup, Microsoft Security Essentials will now ask if you would like to turn the Windows Firewall on or off.
- Enhanced protection for web-based threats – Microsoft Security Essentials now integrates with Internet Explorer to provide protection against web-based threats.
- New protection engine – The updated anti-malware engine offers enhanced detection and cleanup capabilities with better performance.
- Network inspection system – Protection against network-based exploits is now built in to Microsoft Security Essentials.
Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is designed to work on Windows XP, Vista and 7 and protects end users against virus threats and spy ware. MSE is Microsoft’s free anti-virus and anti-spyware product that replaced Microsoft’s paid Windows Live OneCare subscription service which was withdrawn last year. We exclusively revealed Security Essentials in June, 2009 when it was codenamed “Morro”.
The beta is available now at Microsoft’s Connect download site.
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Microsoft announced on Monday that the first Windows 7 Service Pack 1 public beta is now available.
Speaking at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, Corporate Vice President of Windows & Windows Live – Tami Reller announced the public beta. Microsoft revealed its plans for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 last month at its annual Tech-Ed conference. Windows 7 SP1 will include the usual hotfix patches and new virtualization tools in SP1 will help Windows Server 2008 R2 users prepare for cloud computing. SP1 will include RemoteFX which provides rich 3-D graphical experience for remote users. The service pack also will include a series of incremental updates, previously released on Windows Update for both Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
RemoteFX is a new enhancement to RDP’s graphical remoting capabilities. The idea behind RemoteFX is to allow for a full remote experiences including multiple displays, Aero and multimedia streaming to all types of client devices including low cost thin clients. RemoteFX achieves this by using a technique known as host-based rendering. This technique allows for the final screen image to be rendered locally on the remote PC after being compressed and sent down to that remote host. The enhancements are expected to greatly improve video streaming across remote sessions which is currently one of the major drawbacks of virtualized computing.
In April this year an early copy of Windows 7 SP1 surfaced on the Internet. The build leaked to file sharing sites. SP1 is also rumoured to include USB 3.0 support and enhanced Bluetooth/Wi-Fi stacks but Microsoft has not yet confirmed this.
Microsoft released a beta build of Windows 7 to testers earlier this month. Weighing in at 1.22GB the build was compiled on June 3 with the number 7601.16562.100603-1800. Microsoft released the public beta on its TechNet Evaluation Center page.
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