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.
