Firefox Will Soon Support Apple’s MacBook Pro Retina Display

The latest cutting-edge nightly build of Firefox 18 finally features support for Apple’s high-resolution Retina screen on the MacBook Pro. Firefox 18 is scheduled to arrive in Mozilla’s Aurora release channel in about a week. After that, it will make its way through the beta channel and finally become the stable version around the second week of January 2013.

Clearly, the Firefox team is taking its time with Retina support. Google’s Chrome, which set the trend for rapid-release schedules among browser developers, already introduced Retina support at the end of July, just about a month and a half after the feature made its first appearance in the Google Chrome Canary channel (Google’s equivalent to Firefox’s nightly releases).

With Firefox 18, Mozilla also plans to launch IonMonkey, the latest version of its JavaScript engine, which is the result of a yearlong project to increase the browser’s JavaScript performance. Judging by the first benchmarks the organization released last month, we can indeed expect Firefox to get a significant speed boost (around 25 percent in Google’s V8 benchmark, for example) from this project.

If you have a Retina MacBook and want to give this a try, the latest nightly builds are available for download here. This is obviously pre-release software and could go up in flames any time, but for the most part, these builds are actually more stable than the name implies.