Six weeks after the last major release of Mozilla’s web browser, the latest update - Firefox 10 – is now available.
We’ve been tracking the progress of the browser’s beta development for the last few weeks, and while Mozilla hasn’t yet publicised its full changelog, you should expect to see most of the improvements that we’ve grown accustomed to in the various beta releases, including API support for full-screen applications, UI enhancements (such as the forward button being hidden until you navigate back), and various developer-focused improvements, such as new inspectors for Page and Style elements, and improved graphical support with CSS3D Transforms to add 3D animation to 2D objects, and anti-aliasing for WebGL.
The tablet-optimised Firefox for Android, which launched last month, gets these updates plus some of its own. Firefox 10 for Android now includes multitouch gesture support, while Firefox Sync gets a smoother set-up process to ensure that all of your Firefox-enabled phones, tablets and PCs can be more easily synchronised.
Firefox 10 will also be the first version under Mozilla’s Extended Support Release (ESR) programme. ESR evolved from feedback Mozilla received from exasperated administrators and corporate IT managers, who were growing increasingly frustrated at the six-week browser update cycle that Mozilla switched to last year. Under ESR, essential security updates are pushed to the browser, but full version updates will only come once a year or so.
If you’ve already got Firefox installed on your system, your browser will notify you of an update after downloading it in the background. If you fancy installing Firefox 10 from scratch, at the time of writing, the Mozilla site is still churning out version 9.0.1 – but our very own Razvan rather helpfully dug out the direct-download links on Mozilla.org and posted them up here.