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A HOST OF GOODIES have been announced by Mozilla in the beta 4 version of Firefox 4, including GPU acceleration.

The open source software outfit revealed the updates in its online minutes report and set a release date for this next beta version of next Monday. The beta bump comes a mere couple of weeks after multi-touch support was addressed in beta 3 for “intuitive fun and browsing”, no less.

Hardware GPU acceleration is being coded into nearly every web browser so this announcement isn’t too much of a surprise.

“Hardware acceleration of video and other HTML and SVG content, as well as user interface, on by default for compatible hardware on all Tier-1 desktop and mobile platforms,” blogged the Mozzarella Firebadger 4 development team.

Also getting an update is speedier Javascript benchmarking for Chrome users, making the browser 20 per cent faster. That might not sound like much but, with hardware acceleration taking care of resource intensive websites, it could make the difference between a good user experience and throwing coffee at your display.

Mozilla has already moved the user interface to the user friendly tabbed interface but tab candy is also going live in Firefox beta 4. The team said it has landed but that there’s “lots of follow up work to do on interactions, integration with other features.”

Tab candy is apparently similar to Apple Safari’s Expose feature mixed with its Spaces feature. That lets you zoom out to a bird’s-eye-view of all windows so you can re-arrange them. Tab candy does this with tabs rather than windows so punters can organise them into groups. µ