Firefox 16 Beta Brings a Smoother Performance for Games and Initial Web App Support

With Firefox 15 in the stable channel, it was only a matter of time before Firefox 16 was graduated from Aurora to the beta channel. That time is now over and beta users are getting the brand new Firefox via the silent and background updates system.

There's not much to tell about the new Firefox beta, it's the very definition of an incremental update. There are plenty of fixes, some improvements, but not much in the way of new features.

In fact, if you're not a developer, you won't be noticing anything new in Firefox 16. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and you may notice that Firefox is faster or, at least, runs smoother thanks to the new incremental garbage collection.

Incremental garbage collection

JavaScript garbage collection is a method of cleaning up memory of things that aren't being used anymore. It's crucial to keeping memory usage down and Firefox responsive. However, running garbage collection means pausing any currently running JavaScript code.

Normally, this pause isn't even noticeable, it's a fraction of a second at most. You may see a short slow down if you're really paying attention, but it's too fast for it to be a problem. At least, that's true in most cases.

However, apps that need near real-time responsiveness, i.e. games, are affected by garbage collection. A hiccup that lasts a few fractions of a seconds is very much noticeable when playing a game, the erratic performance leads to an annoying experience.

Incremental garbage collection, as is evident from the name, runs garbage collection in increments, very small increments.

This takes a bigger performance toll overall, since it increases the overhead associated with the process, however, it ensures a much, much smoother run. A small performance hit is worth it.

Initial support for web apps

Firefox 16 also paves the way for web app support. Mozilla has been working on its own version of an web app, one to counter Chrome's Web Store and the apps there, but also one that follows open standards and is available for any browser.

The progress has been somewhat slow, but with Firefox OS' release date rapidly approaching, sometime early next year, Mozilla has to get a move on it.

Firefox 16 supports Mozilla's flavor of web apps, but that doesn't mean much for now as there aren't that many apps to test this with. What's more, the Mozilla Marketplace, aka the app store for this type of apps, is not open yet, though developers can already submit their apps.