14 DAY TRIAL // The latest and greatest Firefox is here. After six full weeks of (grueling) expectations, Firefox 9 has been made available to everyone. Existing users will get updated momentarily, those wanting to try out the latest version can grab it from the download links below.
Those that have been keeping up with Firefox 9 development know what to expect, the main new feature in Firefox 9 is type interface for the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.
Mac OS X Lion users are also getting some love in this latest release. Finally, there's better support for the likes of HTML5 and CSS, but also a new method of speeding up asynchronous web requests.
"Type Inference... boosts JavaScript performance and allow rich websites and Web apps with lots of pictures, videos, games and 3D graphics to load and run much faster," Mozilla explained.
"Type Inference is a feature of the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that integrates with the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler to provide analysis and help generate more efficient code. Firefox with Type Inference is up to 30% speedier on JavaScript benchmarks like Kraken and V8," it added.
Synthetic benchmarks don't always tell the complete story, but the three that Mozilla used in its tests, its own Kraken, a modified SunSpider and Google's V8, are pretty much the gold standard.
Users may not get a 30 percent improvement in their regular browsing, though they may get even more than that in some particular cases.
Of course, it is hard to quantify perceived performance, but suffice to say, most sites will be faster and demanding web apps, games, music apps, even Gmail will see the most benefits.
As noted, Mac OS X Lion users will find Firefox 9 integrates better with the overall system theme. There is also support for two-fingered swipe gesture.
Finally, Firefox 9 boasts support for chunking XHR requests. What this means is that content from AJAX sites can start being used and displayed as soon as it arrives even if it hasn't all been downloaded yet, making sites run and definitely 'feel' faster as a result.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.