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Mozilla Firefox Beta 9 hits the web

by Pete Mason on 17 January 2011, 10:09

Tags: Firefox, Mozilla

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa32g

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It's been a long old journey for the community of Firefox developers. More than six months after launching the first Firefox 4 beta in July, Mozilla has announced that the ninth major pre-release version is now available for download.

Remember that Firefox 4 has been feature complete since Beta 7, so don't expect any major changes in this latest release. Instead, Beta 9 just includes the requisite tweaks, refinements and fixes as the developers continue to smooth everything out.

The result should be a browser that boots faster, handles bookmark management quicker and renders complex animations more smoothly. In fact, general performance should be improved across the board .

Part of this comes from a complete overhaul of the bookmarking and history code and from per-compartment garbage collection. The latter splits the JavaScript heap into multiple different compartments based on the origin of the code, instead of keeping all elements in a single large heap. As well as keeping associated objects in the same memory region, this means that the garbage collection has to examine a smaller heap, so it can clear away unused objects more quickly.

Firefox 4 is steadily approaching its final release, which should be available at some point in the next few months. Full details on the changes in this version are available on the release page, or you can dive in and test Beta 9 for yourself now.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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If anyone has installed this latest beta, can you check if CTRL+E moves your cursor to the search bar or still brings up the half baked panorama (nice idea, poor execution).
It brings up Panorama, I'm afraid.
They have changed it to Shift>Ctrl>E, so it should be in the next beta .
Yeah ctrl-e still does nothing useful.

This beta does load quicker and generally feels snappier however I am noticing some problems with handling video, iplayer in particular seems to be unhappy :-(
Still not that overly impressed enough with FF4 to move back to FireFox, looking more and more like a Chrome clone so may as well stick with Chrome/Iron.