After the successful release of Firefox 10 earlier this week, Mozilla released today updates to its Aurora and Beta versions that introduce some pretty hefty changes for the Firefox on PCs.
Firefox 11 now in the beta channel, should have some hefty changes in store for us. One of the largest which wasn’t in the Firefox 11 Aurora release, is add-on sync. You will now be able to mirror the same add-on installations and settings across multiple desktops. Although Google Chrome has been able to sync add-ons for some time, its implementation has been notably uneven, so it’ll be interested to see how well Firefox handles it. A more silent update process is coming to Firefox on Windows, also mimicking Chrome’s updates. Windows’ User Account Control will only require user input for updates once; thereafter, updates will occur seamlessly when the browser is restarted. The benefit of this is that security updates generally won’t require any unusual user action. This is first available in the new Firefox 12 Aurora. Accompanying it will be a change in Mozilla add-on policy, so that the majority of add-ons–about 80 percent–will be marked as compatible by default. This is now in Firefox 11 beta.
Look out too for the new Push-to-Device feature, which will make it easy to send a link from one Firefox device to another — Mozilla cites the example of pushing a link from your desktop to your mobile so you can continue reading on the journey home after work.
Web developers also get even more goodies to look forward to in the guise of a Style Editor for tweaking CSS settings on the fly, and a new 3D viewing option, Tilt, for the Page Inspector.
Firefox 12 now in alpha is expected to bring some interface changes as well a bit of a change to the look and feel of Firefox as well.
Whether Firefox 11 or 12 is the flavor your after, the Alpha and Beta both can be found here, available for Windows, Mac or Linux.