Mozilla has just published the first (and possibly last) release candidate build of its final major update of the 3.6 generation of its Firefox web browser. Version 3.6.4b6 is officially described as the RC preceding the final released and integrates out of process plug-ins as well as OpenGL 2 hardware acceleration for full screen videos, but its JavaScript engine is notably slower than the integration in the preceding preview. Mozilla has also begun to provide more detail on Firefox 4.
If the current JavaScript slowdown is not just a hiccup in this RC release, it is probably good news for Mozilla that Firefox 3.6.4 bridges the transition to Firefox 4 and is not the browser that will compete against Microsoft’s upcoming IE9 and Google’s Chrome 5/6. In the end, it appears, that 3.6.4, which originally was intended to turn into Firefox 3.7, is not the big upgrade we were expecting a while ago.
The main new features in 3.6.4 are out of process plug-ins (formerly called Lorentz project) as well as hardware acceleration, as well as some minor performance improvements.
Out of process plug-ins enable users to continue browsing if a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plug-ins occurs. If a plug-in crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox and you cans imply reload the content in one tab. There is some hardware acceleration support in Firefox 3.6.4, which will enable open video to leverage your graphics card to scale a video in full screen mode, which should provide a performance improvement, as long as you are using Windows and OpenGL 2 drivers. Mozilla said that the actual performance improvement varies across different hardware and software products.
Other performance improvements include a 97% improvement in shutdown time over Firefox 3.6.3, as well as a reduction of the I/O load in the main thread. An interesting side note is that this build does not include support for Microsoft Direct2D, which has been included as a hidden feature in previous nightly builds for some time now. Also, 3.6.4b6 does not include WebM support as a special previous 3.7a5 version.
What is somewhat surprising is that the JavaScript performance of 3.6.4b6 has tanked. Compared to the Firefox 3.7a5 score of 818 in Google’s V8 benchmark, the RC reached only 474. In Sunspider, the performance dropped from 704 ms to 937 ms. Both results of 3.6.4b6 are on one level with the current Firefox 3.6.3 and well behind IE9 PP, Safari, Chrome and Opera. Especially the difference to Google’s Chrome is growing quickly. The current build of Chrome 6 finishes the Sunspider test in 319 ms and hit a score of 5156 in Google’s V8 test on our system.
Firefox 3.6.4 is expected to debut on June 1.
Meanwhile we are learning more about the upcoming Firefox 4, which will be available as beta on June 24, according to Mozilla.
A brief product update now states that the Gecko 1.9.3 engine will use the HTML5 parser, there will be new CSS transitions support, support for CSS touch properties as well as support for WebGL. The SVG vector graphics file format can now be used for back ground images using the img tag. Possibly most interesting is the announcement of Content Security Policy (CSP), which is a Mozilla proposal to regulate how content on web sites interact with the Firefox browser. Mozilla hopes that this new feature will curb a range of clickjacking and packet sniffing attacks, as well as cross-site scripting and data injection attacks.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
