Following the footsteps of Chrome; Mozilla has developed a knack for updating its famous desktop browser as quickly as possible when it comes to version numbers. It was just over a month ago when Firefox 8 was released to public, and already, the final build of version 9 is available for download.
The official release day of the said browser is tomorrow. That is when Mozilla will revamp their website with proper download links and updated version numbers and all, and aligning themselves with past traditions; the final build of Firefox 9 is already lying on Mozilla’s FTP servers waiting to be downloaded by the general public.
Don’t be alarmed by the download itself, it really is the final build, we downloaded the Windows version of Firefox 9, took it for a spin on our PC and its great!
The major highlighting feature of Firefox 9 is improved JavaScript performance. With JavaScript performance improved as much as 20 – 30%, you can rest assured that your JavaScript intensive websites (such as Facebook, Twitter etc.) will load much faster than they did on previous versions of Firefox.
Mac users are in for a treat as well, apart from the improved JavaScript performance, Firefox 9 is adopting OS X Lion’s features slowly and gradually. If you’ve used Safari on OS X, you can easily recall the two-finger swipe gesture for navigating through pages. Firefox 9 now also have those gestures and work just like how they should.
Apart from features mentioned above, there’s nothing new. Cosmetically, Firefox 9 is the same as the previous version of the browser itself. At least, we couldn’t find anything new during the time we spent skimming over the browser’s features.
There are a lot of reasons why Firefox is preferred by many over Chrome and Internet Explorer. The main reason being; Add-ons. Add-ons can be downloaded for Firefox which in turn increases the functionality of the browser and gives you the freedom to do more things apart from just navigating through webpages the old-fashioned way. Extensions can do a bunch of things, such as; allow users to tweet a link right from the browser’s toolbar, or maybe just download an extension which downloads videos from different video sharing services. Sounds neat right? Right.
Instead of constantly babbling about how good Firefox 9 is, how about you get to the downloading part? Download links for Windows, Mac and Linux embedded below:
(via ExtremeTech)
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