After some quite successful preview releases of Firefox 4.0 the brand new version beta4 preview is here. I have written a few words about beta1 and beta2pre, I have skipped beta3pre because I found no speed improvements but now I’m ready to share my thoughts on beta4pre. Have in mind that this is a preview release of a beta and that there is beta3 that is currently the latest non-preview build.

The speed measured with Sunspider test of beta4pre is similar to that in beta2pre. It looks like that the speed of javascript in Firefox is not improving anymore through versions. It is still slower than Chrome – I have hoped that Mozilla team will be able to overcome guys at Google, but it looks that that’s not just possible yet.

On the Mozilla’s showcase site there are some quite remarkable demos though. It looks like with the new browser I will start missing a real graphic card (instead of the one that is on my motherboard now) because they are all starting to use hardware acceleration for videos and graphics. The demos show mainly new HTML5 video features, plus some CSS3 and other interesting stuff. Check it out!