Mozilla has released new Firefox versions for all channels in the past days. We have seen the release of Firefox 9 stable, shortly followed by the 9.0.1 release fix, Firefox 10 Beta, Firefox 11 Aurora and Firefox 12 Nightly.
Firefox 11 Stable will be released in 3 months. Users running the version of the browser right now might be interested in the changes and new features that Mozilla has implemented into the browser.
Firefox 11 is all about web standards support. Firefox users not interested in web development won’t find new features or changes that impact their daily browsing habits. The feature coming nearest to this is support for SPDY, a transport protocol designed by Google to replace HTTP eventually. The protocol is currently only supported by a handful of web properties and applications. Google Chrome supports it, as do the majority of Google properties.
The protocol offers several benefits over standard HTTP. Connections will always run on SSL (no eavesdropping), servers should see reduced load and high latency users should see improved page loading times.
The preference is off by default. Users who want to enable the feature need to enter about:config into the Firefox address bar and filter for the term network.http.spdy.enabled in the preferences window. A double-click on the preference sets it to true which means that it is enabled.
A new battery API has been introduced in Firefox 11, which can provide web developers with information about the device’s battery status among other things.
Web developers do also benefit from new web development tools added to Firefox 11. This includes free-form style sheet editing and 3d views of web page structures.
More information about those tools are available here.
A list of all new features of Firefox 11 at the time of writing is available on Mozilla Hacks. Firefox users who have just been switched to Firefox 10 Beta or Firefox 9 Stable can use the posted links to find out what’s new in their version of the browser.
Update: Mozilla aims to integrate add-on syncing into Firefox 11 as well. (thanks Kshitij)
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Firefox, firefox-update
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