Firefox

Mozilla just release the new version of the famous web browser Mozilla FireFox. See what is the new features at the newest version.

New Features:

Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
[Tech info: Type Interference is a year long research project. Firefox 9 includes modifications to the JavaScript compiler to use inferred type information which speeds up major benchmarks by over 30%].

Although this is very much a technical ‘under the hood’ change, I have included it in the list of new features as it should give a large speed boost to many JavaScript heavy websites and Web apps with lots of pictures, videos and 3D graphics – which makes it the most significant and (hopefully!) noticeable change in this Firefox Release.

Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion to match application toolbar and icon styles

Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion and makes it easier to use multiple monitors

Technical (under the hood) Updates Coming In Firefox 9

Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript – enables JavaScript to indicate to web developers when users have chosen to opt-out of behavioral tracking with the Do Not Track privacy feature

Added support for font-stretch – for use in website display (the font-stretch CSS property selects a normal, condensed, or extended face from a font family)

Improved support for text-overflow – for use in website display (the text-overflow CSS property determines how overflowed content that is not displayed is signaled to users)

Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS

Fixed several stability issues

Conclusion

The major new feature in Firefox 9 (significantly improved JavaScript performance) may be a hidden technical one but it should help multimedia rich websites load quicker.

Users of Mac OS X Lion benefit from User Interface (UI) changes but otherwise there is not much else to excite – of course the stability improvements and tech updates (to keep pace with emerging web standards) are all very worthwhile, but not exactly visible to users.