Mozilla not only launched the latest iteration of Firefox this week, but also revamped its tablet-centric browser to what the company has dubbed "magazine-like." Firing on all cylinders, the company broke down what customers should expect from the new releases.
Firefox 9's biggest improvement is Type Inference, which speeds up JavaScript dramatically. Thanks to TI, the new browser's default compilation mode also boosts Kraken and V8 by up to 30 percent, explained Firefox Engineer Brian Hackett.
Beside the requisite stability and security tweaks, Mozilla confirmed the following enhancements in the official Firefox 9 Release Notes:
- Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
- Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
- Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
- Added support for font-stretch
- Improved support for text-overflow
- Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
On the Android-powered tablet front, Firefox Lead UX Designer Madhava Enros opined that the device's unique new role meant designing a browser that played to those strengths. To accomplish that with the new Firefox for Android, Enros and co. placed tabs off to the left side of the screen when the tablet is held in Landscape mode, and made them part of a drop-down menu when browsing in Portrait mode.
"We tried to be really visual and magazine-like in our presentation," said Enros.
The company also added a Firefox Sync option to easily convert desktop-based content onto a tablet.
"It allows you to take all the things you've been doing on the desktop such as bookmarking, your browser history and even your open tabs and move it to the tablet," explained Brian Dils, Firefox mobile UX developer.
An all-new "Action Bar," located in the top-right corner next to the "Awesome Bar," contains bookmarks, preferences and add-on options, said Ian Barlow, mobile UI designer.
Firefox 9 can be downloaded here. Firefox for Android is available at the Android Market.
