After a small hiccup, Mozilla has released the second beta of Firefox 4. And there are not just bugfixes. Firefox 4 Beta 2 also includes two new improvements that speed up the browser at startup and on complex webpages The key changes are App Tabs, which enable users to change regular tabs into more compact tabs that cannot be deleted accidentally as well as retained layers, which organizes web site content in stacked layers with cached data to enable faster web site scrolling. Rather than having to render objects multiple times, this new features calls content simply from the cache.
Mozilla claims that complex web sites now scroll much more smoothly. We were not able to see a difference, but perhaps we are not looking at the right websites. Mozilla also mentioned changes under the hood to speed up the browser at startup.
A bit confusing are Mozilla’s claims that Firefox 4 is now faster due to JavaScript improvements and a link that describes Mozilla’s new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine. We were under the impression that JaegerMonkey will not be ready until September 1 and are not quite sure if JaegerMonkey is part of the Beta 2 or (we are somewhat sure that it is not part of Firefox 4 Beta 2). The Beta 2 is about as fast as Beta 1 in Google’s V8 benchmark (892 points on our system) as well as in Sunspider (674 ms).
Beta 2 has shown a somewhat shaky performance on our computer with rendering issues and two crashes in less than 15 minutes.
Source: WebDen.org
Mozilla claims that complex web sites now scroll much more smoothly. We were not able to see a difference, but perhaps we are not looking at the right websites. Mozilla also mentioned changes under the hood to speed up the browser at startup.
A bit confusing are Mozilla’s claims that Firefox 4 is now faster due to JavaScript improvements and a link that describes Mozilla’s new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine. We were under the impression that JaegerMonkey will not be ready until September 1 and are not quite sure if JaegerMonkey is part of the Beta 2 or (we are somewhat sure that it is not part of Firefox 4 Beta 2). The Beta 2 is about as fast as Beta 1 in Google’s V8 benchmark (892 points on our system) as well as in Sunspider (674 ms).
Beta 2 has shown a somewhat shaky performance on our computer with rendering issues and two crashes in less than 15 minutes.
Source: WebDen.org
