Firefox 10 is the latest version of independent, open source browser from Mozilla. The new version was released on Jan 31st 2012. The latest version does not include much new features for a normal user, but there are several tools included for developers.
Firefox 10 features:
Firefox 10 continues to follow the policy of less for browser and more for webpages, which gives little space for the browser and maximum space possible for showing web pages. There is a small change in interface. The forward button will not appear on the left of the interface unless you already navigated back using the back button. Note that even Google Chrome, which is noted for its minimalistic interface shows the forward button even when there is no use of that button. This shows that the Mozilla designers are constantly evolving new methods for creating an efficient browser interface with very little space alloted for controls.
Firefox 10 have not improved much on the browser start up time. Actually, it takes the same amount of time that used to be with Firefox 7. For past few yrs, it was constantly beaten in this category by IE9 and Chrome.
As mentioned before Firefox 10 comes with more features for the developer community. Two of my favorite features are Page Inspector and Style Inspector. Page Inspector allow you to check the page layout and HTML structure. You just need to highlight the page area to inspect and Firefox 10 will display the HTML tag for that portion. Style Inspector allows you to inspect the style of the page or the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) information. For eg, you want to know the font type of font size used on a page. Page inspector can gather the CSS information for that page which enable you to get these details. Apart from that, you can also play with these pages by changing these values. For eg, you can change the font type, size etc…. which will then show a preview of that page with the modified values. These changes will not change the original code of that webpage.
Another feature in Firefox 10 is Scratchpad, which is again for the developers. Scratch pad is a code editor which highlights syntax for JavaScript developers. You can then build and test these codes, all while looking at the page where the code will be used on.
Firefox 10 can boast no significant performance update in any other category. It maintained its performance benchmark on Sunspider Javascript behind IE9. Firefox has made the update process simple with the new version and also better add-on compatibility after doing the update which is a positive move. Other notable features of Firefox 10 includes graphics hardware acceleration, excellent web standards support,better cross platform support, cool bookmark organization with Panorama, Pinned sites for all time access, Syncing for tabs,history,passwords and more.
Firefox is still the number-two web browser used by hundreds of millions with a huge fan following. Firefox seems to be losing ground to Chrome of late when it comes to speed,Flash support,HTML 5 and PDF support.Mozilla is the only major web browser which is not from a multi million dollar company profiting from web services and sites. It’s open source policy and degree of independence itself is responsible for a huge following for this browser. With Firefox 10, Mozilla developers indeed built a responsive,secure, compatible and flexible piece of software. Hopefully, we can definitely see a lot of improvements in the coming versions.
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