Newly-Released Firefox 18 Comes out 25% Faster, Retina Support
January 9, 2013 by 0 Comments
|For Web Design and Development professionals, here’s something to grab right now.
Firefox 18 for desktop was released this week, which should already make users and developers giddily excited just for its 25% faster boost. With exciting new features like PDF.js project, retina support, and more, this latest browser is way better than its 17th edition predecessor outed just seven weeks ago.
Mozilla developers used IonMonkey Javascript engine to speed up the new browser. If we are just allowed to show our geekiness (which of course we will) we’ll tell you that this IonMonkey works by first translating JavaScript to an intermediate representation instead of directly doing the function to machine code. Then, the optimization is performed on the IR code first before translating that to a machine code.
For faster performance’s sake, this latest edition also shed away some tears to remove animated themes but that’s pardonable when you realize the latest include massive support to retina and other compliant issues to new web standards, such as initial aid to WebRTC, CSS Flexbox, W3C touch events, and many of the likes.
In what may be another highly-anticipated feature to come out from the well-loved browser is the PDF.js project, which finally lets users view PDFs without plugins. The PDF viewer was developed using JavaScript and some web technologies.
Viewing PDFs is not complete without printing, and that’s where the mozPrintCallback API comes in. Printing of documents as well as those in PDF format gets a high-quality support in this latest browser edition.
Another API that’s added is navigator.mozPay, an In-App-Purchase-like application for web applications.
So, if Firefox’s use of APIs is seen as an interesting start of something big, we are excited to see how the latest browser upgrade will very well ignite the standardization of the use of API in a variety of other browsers in the future.
Amazingly one that’s a good update than the last, it may be best to start downloading Firefox 18 now here.
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