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The latest testing version of Firefox 3 brought along several hundred fixes and tweaks from the previous version released to the Web.

Mozilla's ongoing quest to continually improve the web browsing experience hit another milestone. The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3 Beta 4 to the public.

As with previous beta versions, Mozilla urged people to understand this latest edition is for testing purposes and not general use. The sheer volume of updates between Beta 3 and Beta 4 should reinforce that idea:

Firefox 3 Beta 4 includes more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta, including drastic improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for stability, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Among the updates comes a nod to Microsoft Vista, as a bit of good news in a sea of recent negative news about the operating system. Better Vista integration with Firefox takes advantage of native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms, and uses Vista-specific icons, Mozilla said.

Speed and memory usage, regular concerns about Firefox, continue to receive attention from the developers. "Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4," they said.

On the memory usage side, Mozilla cited the use of several new technologies to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox. "Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned," said Mozilla.

Such improvements will be welcomed by Firefox's millions of users. These updates will be necessary for Firefox to continue competing with Microsoft, which released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 last week.