Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 4, and it crushes the previous versions in terms of performance.

This release boosts performance in some important ways: it adds the JägerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler; adds more support for hardware-accelerated graphics, as well as hardware acceleration for Windows XP and Mac OS X; and enables 3D capabilities, without the need for plug-ins, with WebGL.

It remains to be seen how this release stands up to current reigning speed champion, Google Chrome. via The Mozilla Blog

The W3C recently ran a comparison benchmark of HTML5 conformance among the beta's of the 5 major browser engines, and (somewhat) shockingly, Internet Explorer has managed to come out on top. Chrome 7 beta came in a pretty close second, followed by Firefox 4 beta. Opera and Safari trailed in last place. Pretty amazing to see Microsoft leading Google and Mozilla in standards compliance. It should be noted though that CSS3 functionality and compliance was not tested, nor was JavaScript, and that it's the combination of those three pieces that continue to make up the modern web. Still, nice to see Microsoft making some headway, even if it'll probably only last for a little while. via Neowin