Firefox released its browser number 9 one day earlier than expected and after using it all day, I’m positively impressed with its performance.

The first thing I’ve noticed is the memory leak issue, always been Achilles’s heel for the browser, finally seems fixed. I have an add-on on Firefox called Memory Restart that warns you when your browser is using over 500MB of RAM. With Firefox 8, as well as with all previous versions, if you left four or more tabs opened on the browser for longer than 10 minutes, the RAM would quickly be used up and the browser would get unresponsive.

I’ve had 8 to 10 tabs open for hours and the RAM limit hasn’t been reached yet! I’m really happy with that.

Mozilla’s latest browser has also being tweaked in its Javascript engine that makes it faster by over 30 percent according to its developers.
On top of that the theme integration for Mac OS X Lion has been improved and a two finger swipe navigation, also for Lion users, has been added.

Great release, feels very solid.

Download Firefox 9 for Mac , Windows , Linux