Today we've shipped Firefox 4 Beta 10. If you haven't tried a Firefox 4 beta yet, you should definitely give this one a spin. It's pretty amazing.
If you've been tracking our betas, you'll be pleased to hear we've got more than 500 fixes for you since Beta 9 including some huge performance, stability and usability wins. It's our fastest yet. It's more stable than Firefox 3.6. It's polished up to near release-quality in every way.
Re-posting an answer I offered at Quora:
Why are Opera & Mozilla/Firefox against implementing the H.264 codec in their browsers? If it's a question of licensing H.264 or losing the HTML5 tag, you would think they'd choose to save HTML5. What am I missing?
Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to produce and distribute content in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of any of those amazing technologies.
Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to create tools that helped content producers make and distribute HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of those amazing technologies.
Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to make clients (like Web browsers) that display HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of those amazing technologies.
This is the critical feature of the Web that makes it different from all other media and communication tools that have come before it. This is what makes it possible for tiny little start-ups to become a Facebook or a Google or a Mozilla.
Simply put, this freedom from licensing requirements is what makes the Web great. We, the community of people who make the Web what it is, should not be so quick to toss that all important foundation aside just because some hardware or OS vendors think it's the easy or most profitable path.
The latest Firefox 4 beta awaits you. It's overflowing with awesome. You want to go get it now.
No one owns the Web. It's not built on patents. People building Web sites and applications, people using Web sites and applications, and people building Web browsers and other Web clients all benefit from this very important freedom whether or not everyone realizes it.
Mozilla, and our friends over at Opera, have insisted on this important fundamental principle of the Web as we've built out support for HTML5 <video> in our browsers. Today, with notice that they intend to stop shipping the patent encumbered h.264 video codec in Chrome, Google has joined Mozilla and Opera and lent its significant weight to this critical aspect of the Web.
With approximately 40% of Web usage happening through these three browsers, VP8+Vorbis in WebM will soon have the critical mass it needs to become the standard video technology for HTML5's <video> tag.
update: Mozilla's Mike Shaver has a great post on this development.
