Firefox 9.0 Final Arrives with OS X Lion Enhancements

Mozilla has rolled out the latest stable version of its immensely popular web browser, Firefox. Available immediately for all supported platforms, including Mac OS X, Firefox 9 delivers a few Mac-specific enhancements, and some improved JavaScript performance.

Firefox 9 adds Type Inference, which significantly improves JavaScript performance, and features improved support for text-overflow, as well as standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS.

Specifically targeting Mac OS X Lion users (as far as the Mac user base is concerned), the latest version of Firefox improves theme integration on OS X 10.7. Mac enthusiasts can now use two finger swipe gestures to navigate between pages.

Some bug fixes and other changes (also targeting the Macintosh platform in particular) include (as listed by Mozilla):

· web console: Move close button to the left on Mac
· media/ - compiler warnings on ma
· .jar should not be openable on Mac or Linux, download only (CVE-2011-2372)
· fix mac build with clang
· add offline renderer awareness for Mac OGL
· modules/libjar/zipwriter - compiler warnings on mac
· unable to use mouse to select an item in Select Drop Down list in 32-bit mode on Mac
· Mac XULRunner builds fail intermittently during unification
· tag <pre> is ignored on Firefox under Mac OS 10.6/10.7 (Cyrillic script)
[10.7] Lion Large Back Button is Fuzzy

Finally, the release notes also mention added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript and added support for font-stretch. As usual, several stability issues have been fixed.

Firefox 9 runs on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, and 10.7 Lion, on computers with an Intel x86 processor, 512 MB of RAM. Installing the browser requires roughly 200 MB of hard drive space.

Download Mozilla Firefox 9 for Mac (Free)