Why does Mozilla always have to spring a new version of Firefox on me while I’m at work? Now I can’t wait to get home and try out the new Firefox features. Oh, excuse me, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
Mozilla today announced that Firefox 12 is now available to all users. They’re keeping up with an accelerated release schedule that sees a new version come out every few months to keep up with Chrome. The speed of the updates doesn’t mean that there’s less features packed into the newest version though.
The best change coming to Firefox 12 is only for Windows users. Ever since Windows Vista, Microsoft has included the annoying User Account Control feature that prompts the user to accept an install of any new software just in case it might be malicious. You can easily disable this, but some people don’t out of ignorance or fearing for their own safety. Regardless, Firefox 12 can now bypass the UAC allowing users to update in peace.
The other new addition to Firefox 12 is that looking at the Page Source now has line numbers. This is especially useful for developers who want to take a look at the code running their site. It’s also useful for us game enthusiasts by making it easier to find hints within HTML on teaser sites.
The changes made include “line breaks are now supported in the title attribute, improvements to “Find in Page” to center search result, and URLs pasted into the download manager window are now automatically downloaded.”
The developer features being added in this newest version include “support for the text-align-last CSS property has been added, and experimental support for ECMAScript 6 Map and Set objects has been implemented.”
Like always, the newest release comes with the latest security fixes to make the browser more secure. They also fixed an issue where TinyMCE-based editors would fail to load as well as an issue with WebGL performance on certain hardware on OS X.
The new update, unfortunately, brought with it a few new issues as well. These include starting Firefox with a locked profile will cause it to crash, some slowdown while scrolling in Gmail, some synaptic touch pads being unable to vertical scroll, and using Windows System Restore functionality after updating Firefox may prevent future updates.
Overall though, it looks to be a pretty stable released with some good additions that have been a long time coming. You can download the newest version of Firefox from the homepage right now.