Firefox 9.0 Beta Available

An anonymous reader tips news that, right on schedule after Tuesday's Firefox 8.0 launch, Mozilla has rolled out the beta of Firefox 9.0. This update brings a significant boost to JavaScript performance, UI improvements for the OS X Lion version, and Do Not Track opt-out detection for developers. 9.0 beta also "supports chunking for XHR requests so websites can receive data that’s part of a large XHR download in progress. This helps developers make websites and Web apps faster, especially those that download large sets of data or via AJAX."

Re:The IE team has stopped sending cakes

[Anonymous Coward]

IE sends Firefox Team Cupcake [geekwire.com]

Javascript boosts

[bigsexyjoe]

We always hear about Javascript speed boosts with all the new browsers. Is there any info for JavaScript developers on how to maximize the benefits? I.E. do the changes mean you should think of a particular coding style to optimize your code speed on a particular browser?

sanity check

[alienzed]

OK so the Mozilla team thinks releasing new versions every other day is a good thing. Have they ever considered that it might actually take users time to find and report all the bugs in the first place? There's more just the programmers involved when it comes to perfecting software...

Re:Let it die

[Billly Gates]

I should submit that as a story but I am afraid I will be flamed to death as this is slashdot after all.

IE 10 is in beta I thought and is scheduled for release in March for Windows 7. A commentor in Ars Technica mentioned MS wants a yearly release of IE and March seems to be the month they prefer. My dream would be if MS would make a Windows 7 OEM CD with SP2 that came with IE 10 akin to IE 8 coming with winXP SP 3 cd, so that way we can start transitioning to HTML 5.

IE 8 is the only thing holding the desktop web browsing back and my fear is corporations will want to stay with it until 2019 when support ends leaving us using our phones for the best web experience. At least until IE 8 gets below 10% usage. ... but just a dream.

Ms is very serious about not wanting to lose again like they did with IE 6 and haivng Apple or Google cream them in HTML 5 applets. They blew it! This time if they use standards we all win and I believe they have to place nice this time around thanks to Chrome, Ipads, and driods accessing the internet.

Re:Please stop....

[Jiro]

-- Along with the versioning scheme comes lack of support for older versions
-- The version scheme is a pain in the neck for add-ons, which depend on versions
-- Normal version numbers give the user information; the version number tells us whether it has had major features, bug fixes, etc. Firefox's versioning has the effect of concealing this information from the user.

Re:Please stop....

[flimflammer]

When the rapid version changes stops interfering with addons and other such things, then people will stop caring. Chrome gets away with it because they designed Chrome to be version independent from the start regarding interface and addons. Firefox hasn't gotten that part yet, so these will continue to be annoying.