December 20th, 2011 wasn’t Mozilla’s best day. No sooner had they released the latest version of Firefox than reports started coming in of a killer bug. By the next day, Mozilla had to release a bug-fix version of Firefox, 9.01, just to getting the popular Web browser working for users. Clearly, Mozilla’s accelerated release schedule has real problems. Still, once the launch problem was cleaned up the new Firefox looks pretty darn good.
Let’s start with its performance numbers. The last few versions of Firefox haven’t been very fast. While generally speaking Firefox still isn’t as fast as the current speed-demon Web browser, Chrome 16, it’s better than it has been and faster than the rest.