Mozilla Firefox 7 Released For Mac OS X, Linux and Windows
This time silently and surprisingly Mozilla released the latest Firefox 7 which is officially available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. At least for me it was bit surprised release because these days I keep track of Firefox releases and try to get inform about final version prior the announcement date. It does not matter. The matter is if you are using Mozilla Firefox 6, you should update to Firefox 7 with no interval. This new release has great improvements in speed, memory usage and it now contains 2D graphic component Azure instead of old one named Cairo.
Click on the image to enlarge it.Mozilla Firefox 7 has great improvement in memory usage. When I was using Firefox 6, AVG had warned me many times about excessive use of memory by Firefox. I remember, whenever I opened five or six tabs in one Firefox window, there was always AVG warning. Firefox 6 was using over 400MB RAM and plugin container was using over 150MB RAM. But now, Firefox 7 is giving peace and using less than 30% of RAM. Now with 6 open tabs, it is using 295MB of RAM and plugin container is using 90MB of RAM. This is pretty good improvement. Without using any third party memory optimizer you can save 200MB just by updating to Firefox 7.
Firefox manages memory more efficiently to deliver a nimble Web browsing experience. Users will notice Firefox is faster at opening new tabs, clicking on menu items and buttons on websites. Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days. New tools in Firefox make it easier for developers to build snappy Web experiences for users. A new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas speeds up HTML5 animations and games in Firefox. This allows developers to build more compelling and interactive Web experiences like Angry Birds or Runfield. Firefox now supports the W3C navigation timing spec API so developers can measure page load time and website navigation against bandwidth speed, website traffic and other factors. This API allows developers to test user experiences remotely and easily and quickly optimize websites and Web apps for different types of users.
Now Mozilla Firefox uses Azure; a 2D graphics API. It has better 2D rendering ability. With better 2D graphics, user will have more chances to experience high quality graphics. It’s going to be stateless, and significantly closer to Direct2D. We’re also going to develop new “3D” backends for drawing content in an accelerated way to OpenGL, Direct3D 9, and Direct3D 10.
There are some other bug fixes and minor improvements like Sync for Firefox now synchronizes changes in the bookmarks or passwords immediately. They also say that new Firefox 7 is more stable means it will crash less frequently unlike Firefox 6.
You may face some add-ons incompatibility like DivX Plus Web Player HTML5, Java Console incompatibility, McAfee SiteAdvisor incompatibility, etc.
You can download Firefox 7 from official site here:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/download.html
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/
Firefox is gonna have to really impress to get me back from Chrome. This browser (Chrome) is simply faster and more efficient in many ways and a hell of a lot less prone to crashing. I’ll wait to hear from others before I jump back into their camp.