It's been a long road, but Firefox 4 is now very close to completion. Firefox 4 Beta 9 has been released, one of the last stages before the final build is launched. While most new betas come with plenty of improvements, many features are now coming together in Firefox 4 Beta 9.
With only one more beta and then the release candidate planned, Firefox 4 is fairly close to its final form. But after several months of betas and even more earlier development, it's easy to forget all of the new features and improvements coming in Firefox 4.
Mozilla's director of Firefox, Christopher Blizzard, has created a complete run-down of new features in Firefox 4, from a developer's perspective, and, as you can expect, it's quite a long list.
From the brand new JavaScript engine to hardware acceleration, speed was a huge focus in Firefox 4. It's the fastest Firefox release yet, by a big margin, and promises not only better JavaScript performance but also a snappier UI.
"[JaegerMonkey] is the world’s first third-generation JavaScript engine, using Baseline JIT technology similar to engines found in other browsers and kicked up a level with the Tracing engine found in Firefox 3.6," Blizzard explains.
The new JavaScript engine should make Firefox 4 competitive, though the competition hasn't exactly stood back and watched during Firefox 4's development.
Another very competitive area is hardware acceleration. Browser makers are racing to offset as much of the load to the GPU and be the first to offer a complete solution.
As it stands though, hardware acceleration is not what you might call complete in any stable browser available now.
"Firefox 4 supports full hardware acceleration on Windows 7 and Windows Vista via a combination of D2D, DX9 and DX10. This allows us to accelerate everything from Canvas drawing to video rendering," Mozilla explained.
"Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations because we’re using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9. And, of course, OSX users have excellent OpenGL support, so we’ve got that covered as well," it added.
One interesting feature that has landed in Firefox 4 Beta 9 is support for Compartments, as Mozilla calls them, a method of separating the memory used by websites and various Firefox elements, for better performance and security.
Another major new technology in Firefox 4 is WebGL which is very close to being standardized. WebGL enables web developers to access the GPUs 3D rendering capabilities using standard technologies.
You can check out Blizzard's blog post for a comprehensive look at the technical aspects of Firefox 4, including support for HTML5, the newly introduced IndexedDB and many others.
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