Firefox 18 With IonMonkey Now in Beta
Firefox just released the first beta of Firefox 18, which will be a milestone release for Mozilla as it introduces the IonMonkey JIT compiler.
Firefox users can expect a considerable speed bump in complex JavaScript applications over the JaegerMonkey engine that was launched with Firefox 4 in early 2011. Mozilla currently claims that IonMonkey, which is similar in its architecture to Google's Crankshaft in Chrome, is not too far behind Chrome in the Kraken benchmark, and provides a substantial performance increase in Google's v8 benchmark.
Besides IonMonkey, Firefox 18 will not deliver much else. According to Mozilla's feature tracking, the browser will get per-site third-party cookie setting support as well as inline PDF support. The final version of the browser is scheduled for release on January 1, 2013.
The beta version can be downloaded here.
What about the tab management? Unlike Chrome it will always be able to show like the first 10 characters of the web page and everything about the browser is much more customizable. Also tab candy is really useful for organizing.
I'd name it Schwerpunkt. Then they could use the line "A browser without Schwerpunkt is like a man without character."
There could be extra electrons too.