Mozilla is said to released the fourth beta of its upcoming Firefox 4 browser on Monday, August 23. The beta will include two new features — hardware-accelerated graphics for Windows users and tab sets, which was recently introduced in Alpha stage as Tab Candy. Do take into account that the hardware-accelerated graphics feature will not come with Direct2D [D2D] enabled by default, as confirmed in a tweet sent out early this week by Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver.
Shaver stated:
“b4 won’t have D2D on by default after all; just not quite ready to send it to that many users. soon!
According to MozillaWiki, users can easily enable D2D by performing the following steps:
- Enter ‘about:config’
- Click through the warning, if necessary
- Enter gfx.font in the ‘Filter’ box
- Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
- Below this, right click and select New > Integer to add a pref setting
- Enter ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’ for the preference name, 6 for the value
- Restart
The Firefox 4 Beta 4 code is currently frozen, and scheduled to go live on Monday. After beta 4 is made available, Mozilla is planning to release one more beta, which will include more new features along with bug fixes.
We’ll be sure to report when Firefox 4 Beta 4 goes live. Stay tuned.
via Neowin.net