Our first Firefox 4 beta for mobile is now available to download and test. It’s built on the same technology platform as Firefox for the desktop and optimized for browsing on a mobile phone. Firefox beta for mobile comes with many of your favorite Firefox desktop features like Firefox Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Bar.

A major focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness. Two of the big architecture changes are Electrolysis and Layers. Our alpha contained Electrolysis which allowed the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content, resulting in a much more responsive browser. This beta brings the Layers pieces which improve overall performance and in graphics areas such as scrolling, zooming and animations. For more technical details, see Mozilla mobile engineer Matt Brubeck’s blog.

Firefox 4 Beta includes Firefox Sync to create a seamless Web browsing experience between desktop and mobile. With Firefox Sync, you can take your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, passwords and form-fill data with you anywhere so you never have to retype passwords or long URLs again. Your Firefox data is completely encrypted end-to-end between your computers so that only you have access to it. (For those using Firefox Sync, be sure you’re up to date.)

This release delivers a rich set of features, including pinch-to-zoom, which is now supported on multitouch-capable devices, and the Awesome Screen, which instantly gives you access to your recent history, bookmarks and tabs just by tapping in the Awesome Bar. See the release notes for a full list of features included in this release.

Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is significant step forward in sharing a personalized, seamless and encrypted Web experience across devices. Developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach millions of devices. We are excited to see the innovative and valuable mobile add-ons that developers will build for Firefox.

Meet the Firefox mobile team and watch the demo:

We need your help testing this beta to build the best Firefox mobile browser. Get involved with this beta release and Go Mobile.

For more information, please visit: