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Thursday, November 11, 2010

Firefox 4 Beta 7 Boasts Major Enhacements

Yesterday, Mozilla released the 7th Beta of their new 4.0 browser.  The most significant improvement is a new JavaScript engine which dramatically speeds up the browser.   The new JagerMonkey JIT compiler boosts performance by five times in the V8 Version 6 benchmark and by three times in both the SunSpider ad Kraken benchmark tests.  In addition, more supported for accelerated graphics has been added and even added 3D support.  This means that users will be able to tap into the power of their graphics card for rendering, rather than merely using the power of the CPU to render a page.  In order to take advantage of these improvements, your computer needs to be equipped with a graphics card that is advanced enough to do these tasks.  

These features have been available in the Minefield browser for several weeks.  Mozilla is expected to release the final version of their new Firefox 4.0 browser early next year.  Mozilla has informed developers that this Beta version is stable enough that developers can begin finalizing their plugins for the final version of Firefox 4.0.