{"id":56,"date":"2012-04-30T14:15:30","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T14:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2013-12-05T16:44:34","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T16:44:34","slug":"firefox-12-release-updates-playing-catch-up-with-google-chrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/archives\/56","title":{"rendered":"Firefox 12 release: Updates playing catch-up with Google Chrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was a time, not too long ago when Mozilla Firefox was the browser to be. Developers and users loved the speed, and the finish. Innovations were rife with new and efficient plug-ins. That though, seems a world away in the past year as Google Chrome has increasingly pulled away at the top.<\/p>\n<p>The new Firefox 12 release has it&#8217;s merits, but since they moved to the rapid 6 weeks cycle, there&#8217;s a feeling, they&#8217;ve just tried to upgrade rather than innovate. Here&#8217;s what is new:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>New auto-updater for Windows users, which no longer requires administrative privileges to install updates &#8211; you&#8217;ll be prompted once by the UAC the first time you install Firefox, and the browser will update silently after that. Un-check &#8220;Use a background service to install updates&#8221; in Firefox&#8217;s update preferences if you fancy\u00a0reverting to the old behavior. This also aims to retire\u00a0Firefox 3.6 for good.While the silent auto-updates are probably better than the annoying &#8216;restart your browser to see upgrades&#8217; it&#8217;s yet to be universal and the jury is still out<\/li>\n<li>Various updates to dev console like addition of line numbers to the Page Source window. Messages in the Web Console appear without a page reload. Certainly makes checking third party tags like Razorfish or Mindshare a lot easier!<\/li>\n<li>Support for the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/developer.mozilla.org\/en\/CSS\/text-align-last\">text-align-last<\/a>\u00a0CSS property has been added. Not a world beating leap, but a nice little freedom for designers.<\/li>\n<li>Allows line breaks in the &#8220;Title&#8221; attribute<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Couple of gripes still remain. Besides the fact that some of these were obviously targeted to get on a more even ground with Chrome, some it&#8217;s best UX features are still amiss:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Automatic form filling and Click-to-activate plugin control are probably two of the most user friendly features which has found love for Chrome, conspicuously missing here<\/li>\n<li>With each new version of FF, there were some Add-ons breaking, until now with a notification. Now with silent background upgrades, where does that stand? Especially for the non-techie users?<\/li>\n<li>FF 7 was a good jump in terms of browser speed, but the Memshrink hasn&#8217;t quite kicked on from there. For the time lag between tabs, my favorite &#8220;Farmville&#8221; test &#8211; switching between tabs with 9\/10 of them open while Farmville being on one or two of them, still has FF 12 choking on it.<\/li>\n<li>Crashes when you try to start with a locked profile. To be fair, though, their release notes have quickly detected this as a known issue.<\/li>\n<li>Java security risks are still not addressed &#8211; before running Java applets a little warning would be nice! (you can&#8217;t help comparing with Chrome, here!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While it&#8217;s never a bad thing to improve, the competition has overtaken Firefox, and on current evidence it hasn&#8217;t yet brought out the mongrel to re-capture the throne out of Mozilla. Too soon to judge, if they&#8217;ve been unnerved &#8211; but Chrome is setting the benchmark, and Firefox updates are testimony to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was a time, not too long ago when Mozilla Firefox was the browser to be. Developers and users loved the speed, and the finish. Innovations were rife with new and efficient plug-ins. That though, seems a world away in the past year as Google Chrome has increasingly pulled away at the top. The new<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,24,11,19,12],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-browser","tag-chrome","tag-firefox","tag-firefox-v-chrome","tag-google-chrome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deepanjandatta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}