Mozilla launches Firefox 3 Beta 4

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Firefox 3 Beta 4 was launched today and Mozilla says there'll be more to follow.

To the disappointment of users expecting an imminent full release, Mozilla says there will be at least another beta in order to iron out remaining bugs.

Firefox 3 has already endured a protracted development cycle in comparison to Firefox 2 which went through only two betas before release, however, Mozilla is refusing to rule out even more beta releases past five.

"[There'll be] as many as necessary and I'm not kidding," said Tristan Nitot, Mozilla Europe's chief executive. "We put product quality above everything else, so Firefox 3 is going to be released when we think it's ready."

"There is no predefined number of betas we want to go through. As users will undoubtedly notice, Beta 4 brings amazing performance progress, along with memory usage, not counting the user interface updates. These changes in the code base are significant, and we think it's worthy to test these changes on a wide scale."

Among the usual raft of bug fixes addressing performance and memory usage, Beta 4 includes improvements to the download manager which the company says should make it much easier to locate downloaded files.

There's also an ability to search the website where a file came from and the introduction of a download time remaining status bar.

The team is also promising tighter integration with Vista, OS X and Linux with wider support for icons, widgets and web forms and an ability to zoom an entire page as well as specific text.

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