Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 11 Released by PortableApps.com

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on February 8, 2011 - 11:54pm

Firefox logoPortableApps.com is proud to announce the release of Mozilla Firefox®, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 11 in 17 languages. It's the latest beta of the upcoming 4.0 version of the Mozilla Firefox browser bundled with a PortableApps.com launcher as a portable app, so you can take your browser, bookmarks, settings and extensions on the go. A 4.0 Beta 12 Pre Minefield Portable package is also available. If it's your first visit to PortableApps.com in a while, check out our 62 new portable apps for the new year and the new apps released every day. This release is packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And, as always, it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

PortableApps.com Platform 2.0 Beta 5 users who already have either app installed, simply click 'Check for Updates' in your PA.c Menu to update to the new version.

Mozilla®, Firefox® and the Firefox logo are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation and are used under license.

Features

FirefoxPortable4_small.pngMozilla Firefox is a fast, full-featured web browser that's easy to use. It has lots of great features including popup-blocking, tabbed-browsing, integrated search, improved privacy features, automatic updating and more. Plus, thanks to the PortableApps.com launcher bundled in the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go. Learn more about Mozilla Firefox...

New In Firefox 4.0

  • Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only - OSX and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
  • On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with the Firefox button.
  • You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
  • New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
  • Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
  • The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you'd like).
  • Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
  • CSS Transitions are partially supported.
  • Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
  • Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
  • Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
  • An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
  • Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
  • Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
  • More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
  • Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
  • CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user's browsing history.
  • New HTML5 parser.
  • Support for more HTML5 form controls.

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition is available for immediate download from the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 11 homepage. Minefield Portable 4.0 Beta 12 Pre is on the same page. Get it today!

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Comments

the splash screen for Minefield has "WARNING: UNSTABLE PRE-ALPHA BUILD" in FirefoxPortable.jpg. Shouldn't that be pre-beta since it is, for example, 4.0b12pre (2011-02-10)?

Whatever it is, it's currently stable enough for me with the type of browsing I do Smile maybe because Fx is getting close to an RC!

John T. Haller's picture

Minefield builds are not even of alpha quality. That's what the term refers to. Not where it is in the dev cycle.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

This just happened to me.

Using FirefoxPortableNightly_4.0_Beta_12_Pre_English_online.paf.exe, I got all the way near a complete download and my net connection dropped. The download begins from zero.

This is not an issue for those with superlative internet connections and unlimited broadband usage.

But is there a workaround for relatively non-tech-savvy folks?

I assume that I can use a download manager with the facility to resume a broken download to get "DownloadURL=http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/fire..." as listed in E:\PortableApps\FirefoxPortableNightly\App\AppInfo\installer.ini.

If the assumption is correct, how do I then complete the rest of the extraction/unpacking procedure that FirefoxPortableNightly_4.0_Beta_12_Pre_English_online.paf.exe would normally handle?

Is it possible?

In short, I would hope there's a way to download the .zip file independently and then point FirefoxPortableNightly_4.0_Beta_12_Pre_English_online.paf.exe to the downloaded file to do the remaining magic.

Could there be a command line switch that would point paf.exe to a zip file already downloaded? Wishful thinking, but I hope there's no harm in asking!

Chris Morgan's picture

Put the files next to one another and it'll use it.

I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.

“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1

for the reply. I didn't understand it but the wait for the final version won't be much longer.

Chris Morgan's picture

Put the files next to one another in the same directory and run the installer. It'll use the downloaded version.

I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.

“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1

incredibly dense here, but I'm guessing that I should keep the paf.exe and the latest zip in the same folder and then run paf.exe. I will try that. Thanks for your clarification.

In edit: worked beautifully!