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Mozilla has released a seventh Firefox 4 beta, flipping the switch on the new JaegerMonkey Javascript engine extension, folding in additional hardware acceleration, and allowing developers to build plug-in-free 3D graphics via WebGL.
"This means pages load faster, interactions with websites are snappier and the Web is just a lot more fun," the open sourcers said in a blog post. "For developers, this means you can build richer high-performance Web applications and explore the world of 3D graphics, inherent to the Web.
Mozilla also says that the Firefox 4 add-ons API is now stable, urging developers to update their add-on for its latest browser.
Firefox 4 beta 7 is the "feature complete" beta. It was originally scheduled for release on September 17, and as it was pushed back, Mozilla also delayed the release of the stable browser. It's now due in "early 2011."
"Based on the delays in completing the 'feature complete' Beta 7 milestone against which our Add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule," Firefox development head Mike Belzner said last month on the mozilla development mailing list.
"Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members."
JaegerMonkey is an extension of Mozilla's existing SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. It operates alongside the TraceMonkey extension, which debuted with Firefox 3.5 in June 2009. TraceMonkey speeds Javascript performance by detecting code loops and converting them to assembly language. But there are cases where "tracing" doesn't work. With Firefox 4 beta 7, TraceMonkey still looks to convert loops, but when it can't, JaegerMonkey converts entire methods into assembly. This new method JIT (just in time) compiler uses the Nitro assembler from Apple’s open source WebKit project, the same assembler used by Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
With the new compiler, Firefox 4 is significantly faster than existing Firefox versions, according to Mozilla tests, and it's neck-and-neck with competing browsers.
Beta 7 also enables hardware acceleration for the final rendering of a website – aka "compositing," and it adds hardware acceleration on Windows XP and Mac OS. On Windows XP and other versions of Windows, hardware acceleration handled through DirectX. On Mac OS X, it uses OpenGL. Naturally, you need the appropriate graphics hardware and drivers to benefit from Mozilla's hardware acceleration hooks – and the same goes for the WebGL support. WebGL requires an OpenGL graphics card on Windows or Mac OS X. Additional support will arrive in future releases of the browser.
You can download the new beta here. ®
COMMENTS
Well Done
Enjoy that 30% extra speed, mate. The price you're paying for it is page rendering accuracy, compatibility, add-ons and a browser that nobody except chin-stroking web purists gives a sh*t about.
@John Sanders...
read my last post... quit ranting, and realize your limited options.... chrome, FF, opera, or...???
If you bothered to check, adblock IS available for all these....
(Unless your are not talking about the 'capability', but 'ease of use' ?? A bit like you learned to drive on auto gears, and dont want to learn to use a 'stick-shift'... )
and you might find Opera is more capable than the FF one!! (FF needs a DNS tweak for the really bad pop-ups, that never get past O...)
Firefox GUI innovations...
Are none of such a thing. In fact I feel very pissed when people call reinventing the wheel "innovation".
Their "innovation" is nothing more than a bunch of contrived changes to the GUI for the sake of change, no one asked for any gui change because the GUI was OK.
What people has been complaining for ages and with no end in sight is memory consumption, slow start-ups and general performance degradation.
And what does Mozilla do about those dreadful issues almost every single user has? NOTHING!, let me repeat, N-O-T-H-I-N-G.
Instead they choose to change the GUI almost entirely, waste time providing us with an over-engineering tab grouping feature that doesn't work well, and remove useful features like the status bar. (And those are not the biggest felonies, but not the only ones, gratuitous ad-don breaking I'm talking to you!!!)
The funny thing about the grouping thing is that no one "gets it" or find it useful, and what does Mozilla do? they put a bloody video on the next beta so people will at last understand what the thing is for, assuming not that maybe the feature is not well designed/devised, but that their user base are all morons who can not make sense of their greatest invention.
Sooner or later a proper Adblock is going to be released for another browser, and that day FF will lose a big chunk of users straight away. In my case the only reason I'm using Firefox is "adblock" and occasionally "firebug".
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