Firefox 18 Released

    With a slight delay, a stable release of Firefox became available for download. The official release should take place today, January 8 (most likely in the late afternoon).
    What's new in this version:

    • Transition to the new JIT compiler - IonMonkey . “One of the key innovations of IonMonkey is a probabilistic type estimation system, within the framework of which a hybrid method of static and dynamic analysis is proposed, which allows exact matching of types for each variable and each property of the JavaScript program. Another important improvement is the use of adaptive methods for choosing one or another optimization technique for the executed JavaScript code ”( Opennet ).
      The result of this work was a significant increase in the performance of JavaScript code. When running Kraken benchmarks, Firefox 18 with IonMonkey showed a performance increase of 26% (10% on schedule) compared to Firefox 15 and Firefox 17.


      In the V8 test, Firefox 18 was ahead of Firefox 17 by 7%, and Firefox 15 by 20%.
    • Added initial support for the WebRTC protocol. By default, this feature is disabled. To enable it, you need to find the parameter media.peerconnection.enabled in about: config and switch it to true ;
    • Support for High Definition Retina (HiDPI) screens on the new MacBook Pro;
    • Improved performance when switching between tabs;
    • Reduced browser startup time by optimizing the process of processing certificates for digitally-certified add-ons;
    • CSS3 Flexbox support (and again disabled by default). To enable it, in about: config, find the layout.css.flexbox.enabled parameter and switch it to true
      . By default, Flexbox will be enabled in Firefox 20 ;
    • Support for the W3C Touch Events specification in addition to the previously implemented MozTouch Events experimental technology;
    • Support for the DOM property window.devicePixelRatio , which determines the relative size of pixels;
    • Lost the prefix Page Visibility API;
    • Blocking the loading of insecure content on HTTPS pages;
    • Battery API support for Mac OS X (and Linux too );
    • Added HTML5 support for the reversed attribute for the ol element ;
    • Increased responsiveness of the browser when working through a proxy.


    References


    Russian versions:
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    English versions:
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    Mac OS X
    Linux

    All changes in Firefox 18 for developers

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