Mozila Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 brings a variety of new features, including availability in 70 languages, privacy tools such as Private Browsing Mode, support for JSON and Web worker threads, and improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 has been under development for 10 months, and its release comes over six weeks after the Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Web browser release.

 The latest beta release of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, contains a number of new features, such as availability in 70 languages, privacy tools including a Private Browsing Mode, improvements to the Gecko layout engine, such as speculative parsing for faster content rendering, and support for Web technologies including HTML5 and elements.

"This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3," Mozilla said in a blog post. "Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 64 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center."

Beta 4 will be followed by a Firefox release candidate, which in turn will be followed by the final release of Firefox 3.5. Even before reaching this point, however, the updated Firefox has gone through a number of previous versions.

On March 12, Mozilla released its Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Web browser, also based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, and featuring improvements to Web worker thread support, increased stability with the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and the World Wide Web Consortium Geolocation API.

Originally released in 2004, Firefox is the second-most popular Web browser in terms of market share, lagging behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer in number of total users. On the other hand, Firefox maintains a comfortable lead in U.S. market share over Apple Safari and Google Chrome.

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