Mozilla Releases Firefox 15
Mozilla has recently come out with version 15 of its popular Firefox web browser. Among a few new features, the most notable is the silent update feature. With it, Firefox will download and install the new update as a separate installation from what you were browsing the web with, and it will switch over the version when you next open Firefox. This way you never even have to see a needs-to-be-updated notification.
Ehsan Akhgari, who worked on the project, said about Firefox 15:
This was one of the scariest projects that I’ve ever worked on, since messing something up in the updater component could have catastrophic consequences in case it prevents users from being able to update to newer Firefox revisions. I’m happy that the results of this project will soon get in the hands of millions of Firefox users, and I would like to thank Robert Strong, Brian Bondy, and the wonderful members of our Release Engineering (in particular, Ben Hearsum and Chris AtLee) and QA teams (in particular, Vlad Ghetiu) who helped me a lot along the way. You guys rock, for being extremely helpful, and for making this large project possible!
The complete changelist can be read here, while the short one follows:
- Silent, background updates (new)
- Support for SPDY networking protocol v3 (new)
- WebGL enhancements, including compressed textures for better performance (new)
- Localization in Maithili (see all available locales) (changed)
- Optimized memory usage for add-ons (developer)
- JavaScript debugger integrated into developer tools (developer)
- New layout view added to Inspector (developer)
- High precision event timer implemented (developer)
- The CSS word-break property has been implemented.(developer)
- New responsive design tool allows web developers to switch between desktop and mobile views of sites (HTML5)
- Native support for the Opus audio codec added (HTML 5)
- The and elements now support the played attribute (HTML5)
- The element now supports the media attribute (fixed)
- Focus rings keep growing when repeatedly tabbing through elements (720987)
Download Firefox 15 here.