Does it feel like you just updated to Firefox 8? That is because you literally did just update to Firefox 8. But hey, Mozilla has a rapid release cycle schedule to meet. Who cares if these rapid updates are bloody annoying. Here comes Firefox 9.
Firefox 9 doesn’t contain as many user-facing changes as previous updates. Rather, most of FF9 changes are under-the-hood, aiming to make up for Firefox’s recently bloated past:
- Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
- Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
- Added support for font-stretch
- Improved support for text-overflow
- Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
- Fixed several stability issues
The biggest change in FF9 is undoubtedly the new Type Inference:
Now that we know why Mozilla insisted on releasing Firefox 9, let’s hope we don’t break anything (particularly add-ons) while upgrading.
Firefox 9 is going to be rolled out through Firefox’s auto-update starting December 20, 2011. If you are impatient, you can manually update by downloading FF9 from Mozilla’s FTP repository.