Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 9 Released by PortableApps.com

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on January 14, 2011 - 5:27pm

Firefox logoPortableApps.com is proud to announce the release of Mozilla Firefox®, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 9 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 10 Pre Minefield Portable package is also available. If it's your first visit to PortableApps.com in a while, check out our 32 new portable apps for the new year and the 12 new apps (and many updates) since then. 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 9 homepage. Minefield Portable 4.0 Beta 10 Pre is on the same page. Get it today!

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Comments

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition is available for immediate download from the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 Beta 8 homepage. Minefield Portable 4.0 Beta 9 Pre is on the same page. Get it today!

Some of the version numbers here need updating.

As usual, I'm taking firefox out for a test drive using its PA counterpart. Anyways, for some reason, on its UI, firefox doesn't display a single recognizable letter.

IMAGE
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6580270/FirefoxNoEnglish.jpg

Name of file I downloaded
FirefoxPortableTest_4.0_Beta_9_English.paf

Font work normal on all other applications, including my native installation of Fx v3.6.13.
Font work normal on all my other portable apps. I have only encounter this behavior with FirefoxPortableTest_4.0_Beta_9_English.paf

What could be wrong?

in_vino_veritas,_in_aqua_sanitas.

John T. Haller's picture

Please post a detailed account in the Firefox Portable Support Forum including install location, operating system version, the custom theme you are using in the OS (and also try with a standard Windows theme to see if that fixes it), whether you have something besides English set as your ANSI codepage (check out Regional Settings in Control Panel), whether you are using a standard or modded Windows install, etc.

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

John T. Haller's picture

For folks using this under Wine, it seems that you may need to set Wine's Windows version to Windows 2000 for it to redraw properly. At least I have to under my Ubuntu VM. This is to ensure Firefox doesn't attempt to do hardware acceleration (via DirectX 9) as it doesn't work with the included drivers. It may work if you have real drivers, of course, but I can't test it at the moment.

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

John T. Haller's picture

You can install 4.0 Beta 9 over 3.6.x and it will still use your existing profile. As it is technically a beta, I would recommend doing a backup first, just to be safe. Keep in mind that if you use extensions, some may not yet work with Firefox 4.

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