Firefox shipped their latest update to version 9 yesterday and I upgraded this morning after having my coffee. At first glance absolutely nothing is different and they haven’t changed the UI since version four (which was released at the beginning of the year because Mozilla have decided to use the Chrome style of gaining a version number every month or so) however Mozilla certainly aren’t lying in their press release: it is definitely faster. The Mozilla team reckon its about 30% faster but from what I’ve seen so far I would suggest it was probably a little less.
Firefox has only really got one job at the moment and that is to stay ahead of Chrome. Both are perfectly good browsers and if I’m honest I use both with a preference towards Chrome because it is faster and generally supports more HTML5. Therefore recently Firefox has got itself into a position where it has a team of people trying to make it as efficient and as fast as possible and another team desperately adding new features.
This release seems to be leaning more towards an improvement in speed and security however there were a few HTML5 updates bringing new support for do not track in JavaScript, font-stretch and text-overflow. A feature that Mozilla are pasting all over their website is the new type inference system in the JavaScript interpreter which in layman’s terms means that Firefox looks over the code and checks for where similar values are being produced and then generates more efficient code meaning that web apps run really quickly. It seems to be a smart move and I can’t blame them for doing it but we are yet to see if it will be faster than Chrome’s V8 engine.
Another piece of news related to Firefox is that the contract with Google has been renewed for another three years which means that Google search will continue to be integrated as the default search engine and Google will take a share in the profits, which is bad luck for Microsoft.
