Mozilla today released a beta version of Firefox 18 that promises speed improvements, support for Retina display screens, and more.
The updated browser now supports Apple's Retina display for Mac users "to make Firefox even sharper when watching movies, playing games and browsing the Web," Mozilla said in a blog post.
Apple's Retina display debuted on the iPhone 4S, but also now extends to the iPhone 5, the third- and fourth-generation iPads, and the Retina-enhanced, 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros.
Firefox 18 Beta will also allow users to disable insecure content on encrypted websites "to maintain the privacy of your communication with the website," Mozilla said. With Firefox 14, released in July, Mozilla started automatically encrypting searches conducted via Google's search engine in the browser's location bar, search box, or the right-click menu.
For those with touch-supported devices, Firefox 18 beta joins Internet Explorer 10 in adding support for W3C touch events. That means that websites that respond to touch, tracking your movements as you glide your finger across the screen, for example, will work in Firefox 18.
The touch effects indeed work, as shown by IETestdrive.com's Touch Effects demo. Still not working in Chrome, this feature will be important for Web apps such as games, which can take advantage of touch screens on tablets and all-in-one PCs.
Finally, Firefox 18 beta includes IonMonkey, a new JavaScript JIT compiler. "With IonMonkey, Firefox will perform faster with Web apps, games and other JavaScript-heavy pages," Mozilla said.
But some early testing showed the new JavaScript engine may still need some work. In quick JavaScript testing using the often-cited Sunspider benchmark on a 2.5GHz dual-core laptop with 4GB RAM running Windows 7 Professional, PCMag's software analyst, Michael Muchmore, found an oddity in the beta browser's performance, with increasingly slower results with each subsequent run, rising from 284ms to 331ms.
This compared with a more consistent score of 270ms for the stable Firefox 17 release. On Google's V8, the new beta delivered a score of 6115, trailing version 17's 6510 (higher is better in this test), but on subsequent runs a script error was encountered in the beta, something not seen on any browser previously. There was some good news on Mozilla's own Kraken JavaScript benchmark, though: the beta timed in at 3406ms, versus a slower 4133ms for Firefox 17.
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