Mozilla has begun to wind down work on the next generation of its Firefox browser. In today's release of Firefox 4 beta 12, there are few improvements that will be instantly noticed by most users. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, what has changed are under-the-hood improvements to how Firefox 4 handles Flash and more stable overall performance.

One visual change has been to move hover-over links to the bottom of the window, rather than place them in the location bar as was done in the previous beta. Along with the changes to Flash handling and stability, Mozilla said in its release notes for Firefox 4 beta 12 that the browser now has better integration of add-ons with hardware acceleration support.

The company hopes that this beta will be the last, according to an updated roadmap. The release of the twelfth beta indicates that all the hard-blocker bugs, the highest-priority problems with the in-development browser, have been fixed. Barring major problems with the remaining bugs, users can expect a release candidate soon.