Google and Microsoft have updated their browsers and Mozilla is scheduled to roll out the next beta of Firefox 4 out today. Mozilla is also beginning to make more progress with its new JavaScript engine JaegerMonkey, which is now about 10% faster than the TraceMonkey engine that is integrated in Firefox today.
Google has updated the stable version of Chrome. 5.0.375.126 includes an updated version of the Adobe Flash plug-in for Windows, Mac and Linux that, strangely enough arrived in the stable version of Chrome before a release in the beta or developer channel. Google did not provide details on the update, but it appears that at least Farmville can now be played in Chrome again.
In unrelated news, Adobe said that it has released the Flash player version 10.1.82.76, which takes H.264 GPU encoding for Mac users out of beta into a stable version. “You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature,” Adobe’s Thibault Imbert blogged.
Microsoft had a huge patch day yesterday and released a cumulative security update for IE. Six different vulnerabilities are patched and while Microsoft generally recommends an update, the company said that users with administrative rights to a system are more affected by the update than those users with fewer rights. The company rated the security patch as critical for IE6, IE7 and IE8. If you are using IE, it is a good idea to patch IE immediately.
If everything goes according to plan, Mozilla will have a big day today. Firefox 4 Beta 3 is due sometime today and if we believe Mozilla’s latest crash report data, it may be the most stable Firefox 4 Beta to date. In fact, the data indicates that the browser is just as stable as the current 3.6.8. The fourth beta is already available as a nightly build and we noticed that Mozilla is making slow, but consistent progress to improve the performance of its new JavaScript engine. JaegerMonkey is now indicated to achieve a Sunspider performance of 596.2 ms, which is the first time Mozilla has broken the 600 ms mark. TraceMonkey is at 653.9 ms.
Mozilla still plans on releasing JaegerMonkey in September and it appears that the team has still quite a bit of work to do to take the engine below the stated goal of somewhere between 400 and 500 ms. In V8, JaegerMonkey comes in at 5916.4 ms vs. TraceMonkey’s 6623.4 ms. Google’s Chrome stands at 1670 ms, according to Mozilla.
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