Mozilla Offers Speedier Firefox 4 Beta
Mozilla is shooting for early 2011 to complete its development work and make Firefox 4 generally available.
The new release gets much of its added speed from the JagerMonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler Mozilla has built into Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. Mozilla also has enhanced Firefox's TraceMonkey JIT technology and SpiderMonkey's interpreter.
All those improvements boost the browser's start-up time, page-load speed and performance of Web applications and games, Mozilla said.
The latest beta also incorporates hardware-accelerated graphics into the final rendering of a Web site, a move that enables Websites to load and work with rich, interactive content such as photos, applications and games. For Windows systems the hardware acceleration is done using Direct X technology while for Mac OS X systems it's accomplished through the use of OpenGL.
The Firefox 4 beta also supports OpenType font features and enables developers to render 3D graphics using WebGL. It also offers improved HTML forms using HTML5 form validation and the new Form API.