Mozilla released Firefox 9 earlier this week, which incorporates new capabilities in its JavaScript engine that greatly speed up its performance. After more than a year in development, Type Inference facilitates the generation of more efficient code, running its own Kraken test and Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) V8 around 30 percent faster. Beyond other security and bug fixes, Mac users of Firefox will see support for two-finger swipe gestures and UI tweaks to match the visual style changes in Lion.

Raining on the parade somewhat, though, was the release of Firefox 9.0.1 the very next day. The move was due to crashes reported primarily by Mac users. A bug fix was identified as the cause of the crashes, which prompted the team to perform a roll back on it and re-release it as Firefox 9.0.1.

Linux and Windows versions of Firefox were also affected due to the desire to maintain consistency across all platforms. As noted by Alex Keybl, engineering project manager at Mozilla, in a bullet-point post on Bugzilla, "there is tracking/analysis benefit of having all desktop platforms on the same Firefox version." Have you upgraded to Firefox 9.0.1 yet? Do you see any speedup in your daily usage?

For more:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Computerworld

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