Firefox 4: Fast, Powerful and Empowering
Firefox Director Mike Beltzner has presented his plan for Firefox 4, the next major update of Mozilla's browser
Firefox Director Mike Beltzner has presented his plan for Firefox 4, the next major update of Mozilla's browser. Most strikingly, the new version of the browser is set to switch to an
interface reminiscent of the one that Google pioneered with Chrome—tabs
running along the top of the window, subsuming the window's title bar.
The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser:
- Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
- Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!)
- Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.
Both the end-user and developer communities will benefit from underlying security and performance work. Just as Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 will offer hardware-accelerated Direct2D rendering. This is already showing substantial performance benefits in Microsoft's browser, and is likely to yield a healthy performance boost to Firefox.
As is expected of new browser revisions, Firefox 4 will also include a faster JavaScript engine in the form of JägerMonkey, a new JavaScript engine that melds Firefox's existing TraceMonkey engine with Apple's Nitro Assembler (used in Safari). TraceMonkey excels at some scripts, but often has to fall back to its slower interpreter. The Nitro Assembler will be used to improve that baseline performance.
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