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Firefox 18

Reaching voting age in record time, Mozilla has released Firefox 18 with the new IonMonkey JavaScript compiler, which Mozilla claims will improve the speed of Web apps and games by up to 25 percent. The new release also gets Retina display support (joining the already Retina-fied Safari and Chrome Web browsers) for those running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and later. It also adds “preliminary” support for the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) open framework that enables in-browser video chat capabilities. Other changes include improved performance when switching tabs, improved image quality thanks to a new HTML scaling algorithm, a fix that disables insecure content from loading on HTTPS
pages, and improved proxy responsiveness. Note that if you haven’t opened Firefox in a while and allowed the automatic updates to be applied, you’ll have to go through multiple updates to get to Firefox 18 (our version needed to jump first from 16.0.1 to 17.0.1 and then to 18). (Free, 36.6 MB, release notes)

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