Mozilla announced on The Mozilla Blog the availability of the fifth beta of its upcoming Firefox 4 browser. As usual, the new beta introduces new features and support for additional languages, bringing the grand total to 39 supported languages. The new iteration also includes faster graphics, more secure connections, and the visualization of sound.
The company explains each of the features as follows:
Visualizing Sound
Until now, people haven’t had the ability to interact with sound on the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow. Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web. With this new API, developers can read and write raw audio data within the browser, presenting audio information in completely new ways that could allow, for example, for people to visually experience a speech or a song through Firefox.
Enjoy Faster Graphics
Firefox 4 Beta now takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve graphics performance. On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive websites, giving more power to the Web.
More Secure Connections
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a new security protocol in Firefox 4 Beta that allows websites to insist that Firefox always use secured connections. Firefox 4 Beta now remembers what sites use the HSTS protocol and will only connect to those sites using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the future, helping to prevent “man in the middle” attacks.
The new Firefox 4 Beta 5 is now available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux at www.mozilla.com/firefox/beta. The download file is about 8MB in size.
Watch Demo Video: