In recent months there have been events that could be called historical, for the now inevitable war between browsers. In November, Internet Explorer was dropped for the first time below 50% of the market combined. In early December, then, Chrome was exceeded for the first time Firefox and finished on the podium in second place most used browser. Mozilla's answer came today with the release of the new update of Firefox . After nearly two months since version 8 , download Firefox today is 9.

Firefox beta out of the 9 a day before the official release date and, unlike the previous version, relies entirely on the enhancement of performance. The introduction of the new Type Inference feature on the card guarantees an increased performance level JavaScript up to 30%. Developers will appreciate the new function Do not track JavaScript detection, while the XHR features chunked ensure a faster loading sites, since that will begin to receive data on the screen without having to wait for downloads.

Good news for Mac users, since the browser has been refined so as to properly support OS X Lion, provide better integration of theme and allow the exploitation of new multitouch gestures introduced in Apple's operating system. Besides this, Firefox 9 introduces improved support for HTML5, CSS and MathML and text-overflow.

This is certainly interesting news (although it is more of an upgrade than a true new version, will be the effect of the lightning pace at which churns out new versions of Chrome browser), but at first glance does not seem sufficient to place Firefox levels of the browser from Google. Java performance and HTML5 are improved but are still considerably lower than those of Chrome. Support for Apple's operating system was surely progress, but the implementation of new gesture is accompanied by visual effects available on Chrome and Safari.

It only remains to wait like Mozilla will introduce its "new" creature Journal. The dissatisfied do not care too much, still some 10 hours and Firefox will go into beta .