The latest Firefox, promised by the end of the year is finally available for download. The beta version was released mid November and since then the users had the chance to test it and to report various issues. Probably the best news for Firefox fans is that a hot new feature, Type Inference (TI), delivers significantly increased JavaScript performance.
If you need further details on that novelty, it is easy to find under the official release notes an explanation about the Type Inference project, on which the Firefox teams worked for about a year: “TI is a feature in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine which generates type information about JavaScript programs through a combination of analyzing the program’s code and monitoring the types of values as the program executes”.
But really, all we need to know is that the new feature brings improves JavaScript execution by 20 – 30%. Even if it is too soon to be decisive on this matter, probably with this new addition, Firefox will be the browser with the fastest JavaScript performance, as the rivals Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari lack this feature.
On the official page, the company announces also improvements for Mac OS Lion, such as better theme integration and “two finger swipe navigation”. In addition to support for font stretch and improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS, Firefox brings a set of bug fixes.
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