Mozilla Firefox

As linux users ourselves, we have been frequently fed up with the sluggish nature of the Firefox browser on Linux. Some time back,we told you about Opera 10 which was a bit less sluggish on Linux but then Google Chrome changed everything. However, for many Linux users Firefox is still the most preferred web browser and things are gonna change for sure for Firefox on Linux.

Mozilla's Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems). The experience is going to be much closer to the Windows builds of Firefox.

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011. You might like to read more about the other features of Firefox 6 browser.

Here is an excerpt from Hommey's blog:

After two failed attempts last year, and a few glitches yesterday, 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.

This means we are finally using a more modern toolchain, opening opportunities for things such as static analysis. This also means we are now producing a faster Firefox, now much closer to the Windows builds on the same hardware on various performance tests.

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