Firefox 4 Betas – Graphic perfomance and visualizing sound

Mozilla has been teasing us with the next installment of Firefox when they released Firefox 4 Beta 1 back in July of this year flaunting a facelifted interface, upgraded HTML 5 support, hardware accelerated video and updates security measures. Many of these features we gotten our hands on through the ongoing beta releases but today the Mozilla team has finally put out the hardware accelerated video support and something they have dubbed “Visualizing Sounds” with a new API. Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner stated on his blog:

Until now, people haven’t had the ability to interact with sound on the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow. Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the *video* and *audio* elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web.

The second half of the update Mike provided a video showing off the impressive FPS capabilities by “taking advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10….or on supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content”

Last and of course most important Beta 4 also carries new security protocol HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) allows the browser to consistently look for a secured connection. See, Firefox 4 already gives you the warm fuzzies and it’s not even ready for prime time.

Read [Mozilla Blog]