Firefox 9
I just upgraded to Firefox 9 and according to Mozilla, Firefox 9 ships with a major JavaScript enhancements which makes Firefox 30% faster.
You can see the comparison of Firefox 9 against the earlier version.
Firefox for Mac OS X Lion also ships with two-finger swipe gestures as well as improved theme integration giving Firefox a better look and feel in Mac OS X Lion.
Mozilla also added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript and font-stretch. Support for text-overflow, HTML5, MathML, and CSS were also improved.
Firefox Add-on Compatibility
One of the major complains for die-hard fans and veterans like me is the add-on compatibility. Add-ons keeps on breaking one upgrade after another. I have switched to Chrome primarily because it feels faster and I don’t have to worry about Chrome Extensions. I still use Firefox in parallel with Chrome and if you are using an extension that breaks after an upgrade, you may used the Add-on compatibility reporter to enable all plugins that are incompatible. If the add-on is not working or still broken, you can report them. Very handy add-on.
Firefox 9 for Android
As for mobile version of Firefox, Firefox 9 for Android is now optimized for tablets. Finally. I feel that it should have been optimized for tablets from the very first release but it’s better late than never.
Firefox 9 for Android also has a faster start-up time and camera input support that developers can use.
I still prefer the native Android browser but it’s good to have handy alternatives just like Firefox.
Last Release in 2011, More to Come Next Year!
I know it is less exciting to upgrade to a major release of Firefox nowadays because of the shorten release cycle. If you look at Firefox Nightly you can see that Firefox 12 alpha (Aurora) is already available. At this rate there will be 8 releases next year with the 6-week release cycle.
I bet you can’t even remember what’s the difference among Firefox 5, 6, 7 and 8.
