With the release of the stable version of Firefox 7, or more precisely Firefox 7.0.1, came also updates to the beta, aurora and nightly channels of the browser. Each channel has been bumped up a version. Firefox Beta to 8, Firefox Aurora to 9 and Firefox Nightly to 10.
Whenever Firefox Aurora gets a bump, I write about the new features and changes of the release to give beta and stable users a heads up what they can expect when their channel moves to that version.
Firefox 9 introduces type inference in the browser which improves the browser’s JavaScript performance in the two digit range. The Mozilla developer who worked on introducing type inference noticed performance increases of up to 44%, independent testers results between 20% and 30%.
The few remaining features and changes are not that spectacular. Mozilla notes that the browser is now supporting the new application toolbar and icon styles of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion as well as multi-monitor support and two-finger swipe navigation gestures on the operating system.
Web developers can make use of JavaScript DNT Detection which detects if a user has opted out of behavioral tracking. The only other feature is supported for chunked XHR requests which can be utilized to display “data as it arrives instead of waiting for an entire download to complete”.
Firefox for Android users who can download a version of Firefox 9 for their system as well will notice a lot of changes. The browser now has a new look and feel to it. This includes a new awesome bar design with quicker access both to bookmarks and history items but also to preferences, add-ons and downloads. Back and forward buttons have been added to the awesome bar for easier navigation.
Firefox for Android users will benefit from faster start-up times, especially on devices with slow file systems.
Type inference is without doubt the biggest new feature of Firefox 9. One could say that it is the only end user feature of the desktop version. Only Mac users benefit from additional support for the new Lion operating system.
If you are interested in Firefox 9 you can download it from the Future of Firefox website for desktop and mobile devices.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
Add to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, reddit, twitter
Post tags: Firefox, firefox 9, firefox features, firefox mobile, mozilla-firefox
0 comments:
Post a Comment