10 Things to Drool Over in Firefox 4
Mozilla's Firefox 4 is now officially expected to debut on Tuesday March 22, following hard on the heels of Google's Chrome 10 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9.
Thu, March 17, 2011
PC World — Mozilla's Firefox 4 is now officially expected to debut on Tuesday March 22, following hard on the heels of Google's (GOOG) Chrome 10 and Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer 9.
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With so many new browser releases coming out in such rapid succession, it stands to reason that at least some users are going to need some help figuring out which now works best for them.
Toward that end, I had a chat earlier today with Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox development, to get a sense of what the final release of Firefox 4 will bring. Here are some of the highlights of what we can expect.
1. More Speed
With its new JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, Firefox 4 delivers huge performance enhancements, Nightingale told me, including faster startup times, graphics rendering and page loads. In fact, in performance tests on the Kraken, SunSpider and V8 benchmarks, for example, Firefox 4 blew away previous versions of the browser, with performance results between three and six times better.
Firefox 4 also outdid Chrome 10, Opera 11.1 and Internet Explorer 9 in the Kraken benchmark, as GigaOM recently noted. Bottom line: It's blazingly fast.
2. Less Clutter
Tabs are now given top visual priority in Firefox 4 so as to enable more efficient and intuitive browsing. In addition to its new "tabs on top" layout, however, the software now also offers a number of other features to make it simpler and more streamlined.
A Switch to Tab feature, for instance, helps reduce tab clutter by automatically calling up an already-tabbed URL rather than duplicating it all over again. "It took my tab list from 80 to 90 down to 50 or 60," Nightingale said.
"The slowest part of browsing is often the user," he explained. "If you have 200 tabs open and you can't find the right one, that's the slow part."
Then, too, there are App Tabs, which allow the user to take sites they always have open--such as Gmail or Twitter--off the tab bar and give them a permanent home in the browser. Then, no matter where the user visits, those tabs are always visible on the browser's left-hand edge. Not only that, but each App Tab's icon glows to indicate when there's been activity on that site, such as new mail coming in.
When Firefox gets reloaded, it boosts loading speed by focusing first on the active page and App Tabs, and then loading other tabs in gradual succession after that, Nightingale explained.
