Firefox 9 Released, Offers Major Speed Boost

Mozilla has released the latest version of Firefox, its popular web browser. The firm claims that this latest edition, Firefox 9, performs significantly faster with its new JavaScript engine.

Available simultaneously for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, Firefox 9 showcases the JavaScript "Type Inference" enhancement that Mozilla has been developing for the past 12 months.

With the new JavaScript code, a browser that visits web sites which make heavy use of JavaScript (such as Facebook, iGoogle, many game websites, etc), the pages should load significantly faster and with less processing overhead.

Firefox 9: Speed Boost, Bug Fixes, Security Updates

Mozilla reports its new browser operating about 30 per cent faster than its previous version as a direct result of Type Inference.

In a nutshell, Type Inference works by simultaneously monitoring the values coded into the page and also analyzes the page's Javascript, and is then able to process the Javascript more efficiently.

On Macs, OS X Lion users of Firefox 9 will be able to use two-finger swipes to jump from the current site to the previous one, or to the next one. In addition to the major speed upgrade, Firefox 9 also includes a variety of minor bug fixes and security upgrades. (Source: anandtech.com)

In the future, Mozilla suggests the PC version of Firefox will continue to address add-on compatibility factors, and update itself more seamlessly and automatically. (Source: cnet.com)

Firefox 9 Glitches Prompt Immediate Re-Release

Unfortunately, the rollout of Firefox 9 wasn't as smooth as Mozilla might have hoped, as the attempt to fix an internal problem actually caused the new version to crash Mac, Linux and Windows machines. Rather than solve the problem, Mozilla hurriedly issued an updated version (labeled "9.0.1") that simply eliminated the bug on December 20, 2011.

Firefox 9 follows hard on the heels of Firefox 8.0.1, which was released late in November 21, 2011 to curtail the rash of Mac OS X crashes the browser was causing. (Source: computerworld.com)