Mozilla has announced during its Weekly Update meeting that the code freeze release of Firefox 4 Beta is now imminent. The company was originally slated to complete Beta 7 in September, but had to delay its release twice due to some unresolved bugs. Considering that RC1 was set to arrive in the second half of October, Mozilla has already warned users it may not be able to meet that mark. As far as the feature complete beta is concerned, though, we may have news in the next few days.

Among other things, Beta 7 should have the look and feel of the final version of Firefox 4, the new JavaScript engine JaegerMonkey, GPU acceleration support as well as the new Panorama feature which lets users group and quickly switch between different sets of open tabs. Perhaps not as important but still interesting, it appears Mozilla is finally adding Bing to the list of available engines on Firefox's search bar - though it won't be replacing Google as default.

The new version of Firefox comes as Microsoft works hard to retain its dwindling market share dominance with the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 and as Google's Chrome wins over new users with frequent updates and new features. Although Mozilla's browser remains the second-most-popular way to surf the web, over the years it's grown feature-heavy and has been criticized for being slow. Firefox 4 is largely seen as their chance to turn that around.