Firefox 9 released, speeds up browser by up to 30%

by Steven Williamson on 20 December 2011, 14:48

Tags: Mozilla

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The latest version of Mozilla’s internet browser is now available to download, improving speed and stability issues.

The update for Firefox 9 doesn’t go officially live on Mozilla’s website until tomorrow, but thanks to a bit of detective work from Lifehacker, the pubic download links have been discovered.

The new version adds the following improvements:

•    The new Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
•    Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
•    Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
•    Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
•    Added support for font-stretch
•    Improved support for text-overflow
•    Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
•    Fixed several stability issues

The improvement in Javascript performance is said to improve browsing speeds by between 20 to 30 percent.

Download Firefox 9 for Windows, Mac and Linux.


HEXUS Forums :: 34 Comments

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Posted by watercooled - Tue 20 Dec 2011 15:04
And yet I'm still on 3.6 which seems faster to start/load pages and has a much better interface (IMO), I've even downgraded a system I was using the latest release on. :( Firefox has really gone downhill since this release spamming IMO.
Posted by Fraz - Tue 20 Dec 2011 15:42
Yeah, I despair at Firefox these days. The only thing that keeps me using it is the inertia of finding out how to do everything I want in either Opera or Chrome.

Thunderbird is going the same way. I turned my back for a proverbial minute and ~5 new major versions came out whilst I wasn't looking. As far as I can tell, the only major difference is that the new versions are way less reliable than version 3.1.X
Posted by simonpreston - Tue 20 Dec 2011 15:44
Farewell FF8. We hardly knew ye.
Posted by Ross1 - Tue 20 Dec 2011 15:48
I have been loving firefox since 6/7ish. its been ****ing perfect for months now, kinda dont want anything to change.
Posted by watercooled - Tue 20 Dec 2011 15:50
I've been running Iron (Chromium) alongside FF for a while now and I've gotten used to it - quite a good way to do so IMO. It is a terrible memory hog vs Firefox 3.6 though, definitely something to consider if you have a load of tabs open like me. You can run it in single-threaded mode which does help a lot but last time I tried, add-ons including Flash wouldn't work (they need a separate thread).

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