New Firefox beta boasts speed boost

Mozilla's internal benchmarks show significant JavaScript rendering improvements in the latest Firefox 4 beta. Photo credit: Mozilla

The latest beta build of Firefox includes a component that gives the open-source browser a boost in the speed with which it renders pages.

Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 7 introduces JagerMonkey, Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript engine that puts the browser in the same ballpark as its high-speed competitors. The old TraceMonkey engine was slow enough to no longer be in the same league as Chrome, Opera, Safari and the Internet Explorer 9 beta.

Mozilla has incorporated the JagerMonkey JIT (Just-in-Time) compiler into the new SpiderMonkey engine, and says that users can expect to see significantly faster start-up times and page-load speeds. It should also improve the speed of JavaScript-intensive web tasks such as running apps and playing games. Mozilla Firefox benchmarks image

The company's internal benchmarking shows Firefox 4 is three times faster than the current Firefox 3.6.12 on both Kraken and Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks, and five times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the V8 benchmark. Engineer David Mandelin stated in a blog post that Firefox 4 will be "a little bit faster" by the time it is finished.

For more on this story, read Firefox 4 gets much, much faster on CNET News.