Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 released, this time for real

A few days after an unusual false start, during which testers at a virtual worldwide party made do with a release candidate, Mozilla gives the public its next taste of what's coming in Firefox.

BetaNews FileForum has posted Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 this morning, and the good news is, it's still there.

Last week, the link went live for Beta 4, but FileForum users and testers immediately noticed upon installation the prominent message, "This is not Firefox 3.0 Beta 4." It was a version of the message Mozilla typically posts as the default newcomer's page for release candidate installations; and in Mozilla's testing procedure, there are "private" RCs prior to the release of public betas.

That RC happened to be surprisingly stable in BetaNews tests, and thus far this morning, the real Beta 4 is showing off its skills remarkably well -- though we've yet to put it through its full paces. In an effort to give the browser something more of an IE7 "trademark" appearance, new testers will be surprised to find the extra large Back button within an inset, beveled housing, in the new default theme. The Home button, meanwhile, has moved to the left side of the Bookmarks Toolbar, though it is not a shortcut like the other entries there, and cannot (easily) be removed (UPDATE unless you pose the problem to one of our own readers...see our comments below).

In BetaNews testing, Beta 4 passed the Acid2 test from the Web Standards Project splendidly and quickly, with no obvious errors. Of course, last week, the WSP raised the bar on standards compliance with its Acid3 test, for which our Beta 4 scored a 67/100. (You can tell Beta 4 wasn't perfect in this picture, because the queued-up boxes should be in color.) That score is actually quite impressive, and the highest we've seen from Mozilla since Acid3's release...especially compared with IE8 Beta 1, which scored for us a measly 17/100.

BetaNews' test environment is Windows Vista Ultimate running in a Microsoft Virtual PC environment, on a Windows XP-based PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

One new feature we noted for Beta 4 right away is full zoom, which is a big step up from the "Text Size" menu in Firefox 2. This feature is not only capable of stepping up or down text size in magnification increments of 10%, but scaling graphics to fit as well. The graphics scaling also appears to work perfectly for Flash-based ads and Flash videos, whose frames scale up to match the current frame resolution.

IE8 Beta 1 also boasts a similar feature, and we've noted that Firefox 3 Beta 4 omits the "thumb" slider along the bottom for live scaling. Firefox's status bar is often reserved for use by its add-ons, though for now, fairly quick scaling can be achieved by pressing Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-[minus].