New and improved Firefox 9!

Firefox‘s adoption of the fast-paced release cycle following the footsteps of Google Chrome, has had a wonderful impact on the way the browser has evolved (with visibility) in the short span of time. On 20th Dec ’11, Mozilla announced the release of the version 9 of its flagship browser under the release channel. With over 1140 issues closed for this release, the improvements are beneficial to both developers and users.

For Users

The most notable enhancement has been the introduction of the Type Interface feature that accelerates the javascript performance of many heavy-duty websites. As per Mozilla, this feature accelerates javascript execution by over a rate of 30% – which is pretty impressive.

TI is a feature in the SpiderMonkey Javascript engine which generates type information about Javascript programs through a combination of analyzing the program’s code and monitoring the types of values as the program executes. This type information is used during JIT compilation to generate more efficient code; Firefox 9 includes modifications to the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler to use inferred type information. This compilation mode, which is the default in Firefox 9, speeds up major benchmarks like Kraken and V8 by over 30%, and gives a large speed boost to many JS heavy websites.

Second is a much welcome upgrade likely to improve the experience of MacOS X Lion users. The change added theme integration and also two-finger swipe navigation to the OS X version of firefox.

The update also fixed a lot of security and stability issues where users had reported crashes due to some large instances of the HTML5 <video> implementations.

For Developers

For the developers, the Type Interface gives a chance to add that extra amount of javascript functionality to make their websites snazzier – however, to provide a consistent user experience across multiple browsers, developers may refrain from going ahead with heavy javascript modifications.

Mozilla has also improved upon the standards support for HTML5, CSS (font-stretch, text-overflow) and MathML. And more importantly, the update has added a way to assess if the user has opted for DNT (Do Not Track) using javascript. While this is a great feature, we have to wait and see how many ad agencies and web trackers go ahead and respect its optimal usage.

Recommended Update

Also with Mozilla embracing the auto-update process, Firefox may have already been updated  for you. If not, you do know where to get it from right?

Bleeding Edge

Also, Mozilla has adopted the new bleeding edge release channel called the Aurora that is one-step better than the nightly but not release-ready. If you are up to it, read what we had to say about it and download it here.