firefox Firefox 10

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Firefox (referred to as Fx) is an open source browser developed by Mozilla. The second most popular browser worldwide, Firefox features a customizable user interface that allows you to enhance it using custom themes and Personas. Personas change the appearance of the user interface without rearranging the elements. Themes however, can completely change the UI ranging from the types of buttons to the color sceme used. Add-ons allow you to customize Firefox to your liking to make a more enjoyable web surfing experience. Some examples of popular add-ons that you can use to customize Firefox are AdBlock Plus, DownThemAll!, TabMixPlus and many more.

Firefox has tabbed browsing, bookmarks, a built in session manager, private browsing, personas, themes, add-ons and more. Firefox does not use ActiveX which helps make it a more secure browser. Firefox does make use of many plugins to enhance your web experience. From Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime and more; your browsing experience reaches new levels with the Firefox browser.

Downloads: Firefox 10.0 | All builds

View: Release Notes

Homepage: Mozilla Firefox

View the full article

[Eldmannen]

I hope to see support for the <details> and <summary> elements, also for syntax highlighting of JavaScript and CSS.

I think the CSS thing could be left to extensions such as Firebug since most people would not benefit from it, and that it is for webdevelopers which is a subset of the userbase.

I am not sure hiding the forward button is a good idea, but maybe it is. I'm not convinced yet though.

[greenknight]

Have you checked out the Web Developer tools which are included in this version?

Moving on, I should mention that this is the first Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox. To meet the needs of business users who can't deal with updating so often, this release will be supported for 54 weeks. The next ESR will be produced 12 weeks before this one's end-of-life date, to give sysadmins time for testing and deployment - thus, it will be Firefox 17.

If you don't like the hidden forward button, you can use a custom theme which doesn't have it.

[greenknight]

Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal - MozillaWiki explains the ESR plan in detail.

The ESR will come out after that 12-week testing period I mentioned above. They say it will be "based on" Firefox 10, but AFAICT it will be identical to Firefox 10 except it will get only security and stability updates (that part is a little murky).

[Eldmannen]

Have you checked out the Web Developer tools which are included in this version?

Yes, but it will be used by a minority only (developers).

I think it would be better to not bloat the browser with such features and let it by an extension instead.

Firebug serves me well.

[James_A]

The ESR will come out after that 12-week testing period I mentioned above. They say it will be "based on" Firefox 10, but AFAICT it will be identical to Firefox 10 except it will get only security and stability updates (that part is a little murky).

Firefox 10esr is already out. But, as you say, details are still a bit murky, although it will definitely receive all the security updates, but no new "features". In that respect it's just like the 3.6 series and in fact, when 3.6 reaches EOL there will be an upgrade path to 10.0esr. It's definitely a separate build and a separate release channel from the "regular" Firefox as the file names indicate (Firefox Setup 10.0esr.exe versus Firefox Setup 10.0.exe).

There's more information at the following page:-

Firefox Extended Release Support for Your Organization, Business, Enterprise - Overview

However, what I can't find is a proper download page for the ESR release channel. There's a download link for the English-USA (en-US) version on the above page, but no indication at all that it is actually available in 86 different languages.

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[greenknight]

You managed to find more than I could, at least. Looks like you have to subscribe to the mailing list to find out much more - maybe they hope to discourage those outside the target group from getting it. Probably won't work - lots of people besides business users dislike the rapid update schedule and would like to get it.

It's on a separate release/update channel, but is there any other difference from the standard browser? Changing the update channel you're on is a really trivial matter, anybody can do it. I wouldn't be surprised if instructions for doing so are soon posted around the Web, and many people start switching to this channel so they get only security updates.

[James_A]

I don't know what the detailed differences from "regular" are, but I will be testing it in a couple of days or so, having previously deployed the "regular" version across a small network.

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[Eldmannen]

I am looking forward to the Extended Support Release.

Right now at our company, we still have to support Firefox 3.6.

Which means we have to hold back on technology and use old s*** when we want to use modern cool stuff like HTML5, CSS3, etc.

Though, then we still have to care about the lusers on IE6, god I hate those people!

[James_A]

Two things have happened since I last posted:

• There is now a proper download page for the ESR version, all languages and all platforms.
  
• Firefox has now been updated from 10.1 to 10.0.1, because of an exploitable crash and a Java incompatibility.
  

The ESR download page is: Firefox Extended Support Release for organizations | International versions: Get Firefox in your language

It's also a good time to evaluate 10.0.1 ESR, because 3.6 is now on a 12-week countdown to End-of-Life.

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[James_A]

Firefox is now up to version 10.0.2, released yesterday.

Changes: Release Notes

[Eldmannen]

I am a bit disappointed that it doesn't support as much of HTML5 and CSS3 as I think it should.

And not as much features too.

I would like to see:

* Pretty printing of JSON

* Syntax highlighting for JavaScript and CSS

* Support for the <details> element.

[James_A]

I think only Chrome supports <details>

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It's not in Firefox 12* nor in IE 10 nor in Opera 12, but it's supposed to be coming soon to Opera.

There's not been any major changes in Firefox with either 9 or 10, so both are disappointing. Instead Mozilla seems to be concerned with unannounced changes to usability like changing the number of lines scrolled when the arrow keys are held down (for parity with IE).

*In fact it hasn't even been assigned in Mozilla's Bugzilla and there's no indication of any target (or even any interest in doing it IMO).

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