Fasten Your Seatbelts – Firefox 4 Beta adds new JavaScript power and faster graphics
A new release of Firefox 4 Beta is now ready for you to download and test! This release boosts performance in some important ways: it adds the JägerMonkey just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler; adds more support for hardware-accelerated graphics, as well as hardware acceleration for Windows XP and Mac OS X; and enables 3D capabilities, without the need for plug-ins, with WebGL.
This means pages load faster, interactions with websites are snappier and the Web is just a lot more fun. For developers, this means you can build richer high-performance Web applications and explore the world of 3D graphics, inherent to the Web.
Also, the Add-ons APIs for Firefox 4 are now stable, so if you are an add-on developer, now is the time to update your Firefox 3.6-compatible Add-ons to support Firefox 4.
What’s New:
Boosting JavaScript Performance with JägerMonkey
JägerMonkey is an invisible but powerful addition to Firefox 4 Beta. The Firefox SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine now incorporates the new JägerMonkey JIT compiler, which, along with enhancements to the existing TraceMonkey JIT and SpiderMonkey’s interpreter, add up to speeds that really show off today’s rich Web apps. You’ll notice this in faster start-up time, improved page-load speed and the performance of Web apps and games.
Firefox 4 Beta is really fast. Here’s how the latest beta compares with Firefox 3.6 and previous versions of Firefox 4 Beta on various JavaScript benchmark test suites:
Firefox 4.0 Beta Performance Graph
Boosting Graphics Performance
This update to Firefox 4 Beta incorporates hardware-accelerated graphics into the final rendering of a website — referred to as “compositing.” This enables websites to load and respond faster to rich and interactive content like Web games, apps or photos. On Windows (including Windows XP), hardware acceleration is done using DirectX technology; on Mac OS X, it’s done using OpenGL.
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