Mozilla Launches Firefox 9, Speeds Up JavaScript

From PC World: Mozilla on Tuesday shipped Firefox 9, claiming that the new browser processes JavaScript up to 36 percent faster than its predecessor.

The company also patched six Firefox vulnerabilities, and released a security update to the nearly-two-year-old Firefox 3.6 to quash a single bug there.

Firefox 9, released six weeks after November's Firefox 8 , uses a technology called "type inference" in its SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine to generate native code more efficiently using the JaegerMonkey JIT (just-in-time) compiler Mozilla first added to Firefox last March.

The result: Firefox 9 renders JavaScript -- the backbone of many online games, content-rich websites and advanced Web apps -- between 16% and 36 percent faster than Firefox 8, according to results Mozilla posted from Mozilla's Kraken, Google's V8 and the widely-cited SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test suites.

Mozilla also tweaked Firefox's Interface on Mac OS X 10.7 to support Lion's two-fingered swipe gesture for navigating backward and forward through already-viewed pages or sites.

View: Article @ Source Site