Mozilla is laying claim to big performance improvements forFirefox 9, while Firefox for Androidgoes in for a shave and a haircut as it gets an entirely different look. Both desktop and Android updates are being released today.
Firefox 9 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux |Android) continues the browser's rapid-release development oscillation, where feature enhancements and performance improvements take the lead in alternating months.
The JavaScript improvement called Type Inference, which Mozilla spent more than a year developing, debuts on the PC version of Firefox. The short version is that sites that heavily rely on JavaScript--like Web apps or sites that render games, video, and 3D graphics--will render much, much faster.
What actually changed is this: A feature in Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, Type Inference creates type information by both monitoring the types of values as the program runs and analyzing the program's code. The type information then gets used during "just-in-time" compilation to generate more efficient code, and Mozilla says that major benchmarks like its own Kraken test and Google's V8 show the browser running around 30 percent faster.
On Macs, OS X Lion users will finally see support for two-finger swipe gestures, which sounds more offensive than it is. This simply means that if you've got the latest Mac OS, it'll be easier for you to jump from site to site. The Mac interface has also been tweaked to match the slight visual changes that arrived in Lion, and multiple monitor support in the browser has been improved.
No comments:
Post a Comment