Firefox 9 features a revamped user interface to enhance browsing on tablet

Firefox 9 features a revamped user interface to enhance browsing on tablet screens and is similar to the group’s previous releases in that it integrates with Firefox Sync, which makes it easy to access browsing history and open tabs, bookmarks and saved passwords across desktop and mobile devices.

Mozilla on Tuesday shipped Firefox 9, claiming that the new browser processes JavaScript up to 36% faster than its predecessor. The company also patched six Firefox vulnerabilities, and released a security update to the nearly-two-year-old Firefox 3.6 to quash a single bug there. Firefox 9, released six weeks after November's Firefox 8, uses a technology called "type inference" in its SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine to generate native code more efficiently using the JaegerMonkey JIT (just-in-time) compiler Mozilla first added to Firefox last March.

The result: Firefox 9 renders JavaScript -- the backbone of many online games, content-rich websites and advanced Web apps -- between 16% and 36% faster than Firefox 8, according to results Mozilla posted from Mozilla's Kraken, Google's V8 and the widely-cited SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test suites. As part of the upgrade to Firefox 9, Mozilla also patched a half-dozen vulnerabilities, four of them rated "critical," the company's highest threat warning. Mozilla also released Firefox 3.6.25, the latest security update for the still-supported 2010 browser, re-patching a single flaw on Mac OS X that was originally -- and incorrectly -- addressed in late September.

At the same time that it shipped Firefox 9 for desktop computers, Mozilla also released a new Android version of its browser that features a reworked interface for smartphones, and its first designed for tablets.--Firefox for Android can be downloaded from Google's Android Market. In other news, Mozilla and Google yesterday announced that they had penned a new search contract that pays the former for assigning the latter's engine as the default search provider in Firefox. Windows, Mac and Linux editions of Firefox 9 can be downloaded manually from Mozilla's site; people running Firefox 4 or later will be offered the upgrade through the browser's own update mechanism.

The next version of Firefox is scheduled to ship Jan. 31. Failing to come to an agreement would cost Google money — quite possibly a lot of money, as Mozilla’s Firefox still edges out Google’s Chrome in most measurements of browser usage — but probably wouldn’t have changed the overall trajectory of the company much. Mozilla, on the other hand, stood to lose its biggest source of funding (as much as 84%) and potentially frustrate already-fickle browser users for whom “search” means “Google.”

Firefox’s most likely backup plan — extending Most Favored Search Engine status to Bing instead of Google — would have been unthinkable just five years ago, with Mozilla positioning itself as the anti-Microsoft and Firefox as the anti-Internet Explorer. just a month before their revenue agreement was scheduled to expire — Mozilla released a custom version of Firefox for Bing users, extending a second revenue partnership and creating a key insurance policy if the Google deal fell apart. To me, this is the lesson of the Mozilla-Google standoff. Today, it’s the search and advertising engine — now, overwhelmingly Google.