Friday 12 November 2010

Welcome back, Firefox!

Yeah, we missed you, Firefox ;) Welcome back!
I was a great Firefox supporter. I work also in a public administration and I suggest always to install it: Zimbra works well under Firefox (we still use Windows 2000), but in last year I become less enthusiast. When Chrome and Safari entered the browser market, Firefox appeared disoriented. It introduced some new features (Persona, Jetpack), but nothing really interesting for the end-user; I never used extensions (never found one really usefull, maybe I'll search better) and Chrome and Safari beated Firefox in brute speed. But now I'm using Firefox 4 (Beta 7) and I find it really fast.
What's new on Firefox 4?
First: a the javascript engine uses a JIT compiler (JägerMonkey), just like Chrome.
Second: graphics it's rendered using DirectX (on Windows) of OpenGL (on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux)
This second feature means also Firefox can use the new WebGL standard.
Groovy!
I suggest you to give it a try if you passed to Safari/Chrome and you feel the lack of some extensions. You will have a surprise.
And a final joke: What  did Firefox so far? The playmate? Errr...!

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