Coming Soon: A Faster Firefox for Linux Users

Linux users' proverbial cup is already overflowing this outpouring thanks to several recent coups for the open source operating system. Antitrust worst calendar week, however, more good news arrived for users of the free software in the form of an declaration from Mozilla that Firefox has been acknowledged a huge speed further on Linux.

Specifically, despite several failed attempts in the knightly, a chemical group of Mozilla developers has succeeded in acquiring the open source web browser's Linux builds to collect with interlingual rendition 4.5 of GCC, surgery the Wildebeest Compiler Ingathering.

"We finally managed to get our Linux (and, obviously, Linux64) builds to use GCC 4.5, with aggressive optimization (-O3) and profile guided optimization enabled," wrote developer Mike Hommey on Friday.

"This substance we are finally victimisation a more than modern toolchain, opening opportunities for things much Eastern Samoa adynamic analysis," Hommey explained. "This as wel agency we are at present producing a faster Firefox, now much closer to the Windows builds on the same hardware on various execution tests."

Though the feature is not slated to appear officially until Firefox 6, the newly improved builds should work on older Linux platforms as well, including Red Hat and CentOS 5, Hommey noted. The main thing that's required is that they attach to the Wildebeest standard libstdc++ program library from GCC 4.1, he added.

First Firefox 5 Beta Build

Tailing the wildly successful unveiling of Firefox 4 in Butt, the new browser just exceeded 10 percent market share for the first time this past weekend, according to energising data from StatCounter. Still ahead of Firefox 4 are just Microsoft's I 8 and Mozilla's have Firefox 3.6, according to StatCounter's information.

Meanwhile, as part of its new, six-week development cycle, Mozilla just posted its first Firefox 5 beta build. Now fashioning its way into that variant are new CSS3 support and chit management along with improved HTML5 support, accordant to a composition in ConceivablyTech.

The final release of Firefox 5 is due on June 21, likely followed by Firefox 6 in mid-August.

Information technology's been noticeable to Linux users for some time now that Firefox didn't perform as well there arsenic it did on Windows. It's great to see Mozilla address the issue and reaffirm its commitment to this ontogenesis section of the market.