Firefox 9 has rolled out onto Mozilla’s servers and the latest version of the browser offers a number of news. Not the least Firefox 9.0 will bring 30% better JavaScript performance and improved support for themes and swipe navigation in Mac OS X.
By integrating type inference in the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler Mozilla has managed to improve JavaScript performance with 20-30%, a project the company has been working on for nearly 18 months. The new addition to the JavaScript code is a step closer to the original C++ code and makes it possible to improve performance even further, without the need for more complex programming. Firefox is so far the only browser with support for this kind of technology, but in the JS benchmark Kraken we still get hints that Google Chrome is still faster, although just barely.
Besides optimized JS performance Mozilla says it has improved the support for HTML5 and CSS, but also added support for “two finger swipe navigation” in Mac OS X. Download links for Firefox 9 can be found below.
Download Firefox 9: Mozilla (Windows), (Mac), (Linux)
