Unlucky for Firefox? Beta 13 a possibility

Mozilla developers have said there could be a 13th beta of Firefox 4.

The next version of the open-source browser was initially set to show up at the end of last year, but is now expected to arrive in March.

So far, a whopping 11 betas have been released, and a 12th is expected to arrive soon. While Mozilla developers are expecting that will be the last beta before the release candidate arrives, they’re keeping their options open.

We reserve the right to have a beta 13 if issues found in beta 12 need additional coverage before a release candidate

“As of now, beta 12 is the last planned beta,” said Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto on the Mozilla developer site. “We reserve the right to have a beta 13 if issues found in beta 12 need additional coverage before a release candidate.”

Legnitto said developers were waiting to finish up a few major bug fixes over the next couple of days before shipping the 12th beta.

Chrome keeps pace

Meanwhile, rival browser developer Google has released the beta for Chrome 10, saying it’s two-thirds faster than version 9.

“With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before,” said product managers Jeff Chang and Min Li Chan in a post on the Google blog.

“In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.”

The beta lets saved passwords be synchronised across multiple computers, and introduces an early version of GPU-accelerated video.

“Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage,” the pair said. “In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%.”

Chrome 10 also sees Google’s ‘Instant’ technology applied to the address bar, with the browser predicting and pre-loading websites as you type their URL.