Mozilla delivers a new update to the Firefox 4 Beta, which features faster graphics, new audio capabilities and enhanced security. Mozilla continues to hone its browser with new beta updates every few weeks.
Mozilla has delivered a new
update
to the Firefox 4 Beta, which features faster graphics, new audio
capabilities and enhanced security.
In a Sept. 7 blog post,
Mike
Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said the new update to the latest
beta of the company's popular open-source browser takes advantage of the
built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with
DirectX
10 to improve performance on graphics-heavy Websites.
"On supported hardware, Firefox will use
Direct2D
by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive Websites,
giving more power to the Web," Beltzner said.
In a separate post,
Bas
Schouten, a Mozilla developer who works on the Firefox graphics engine,
said: "Usually when we talk about hardware acceleration we mean using the
graphics card of your computer to accelerate certain graphical operations.
Nowadays the graphics cards in most people's computers have an immense amount
of computational power, often many times more than the normal processor. This
computational power is very specialized and cannot just be used for anything.
It's most commonly used for video games, but obviously as web browsers use more
and more graphical effects, we want to use it inside Firefox as well!"
Schouten describes Direct2D as a rendering system part of the DirectX
package that is shipped with Windows. "It was introduced in Windows 7 and
ported back to Windows Vista in the Vista Platform Update," he said. "It
allows us to access the hardware with a simple 2D graphics drawing API
for all Mozilla drawing code, allowing hardware acceleration for a very large
number of scenarios."
Meanwhile, Beltzner said a new audio API
exposes the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio>
elements in HTML5; developers can use the API
to build add-ons that will completely redefine how users experience sound on
the Web.
"Until now, people haven't had the ability to interact with sound on
the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow," Beltzner
said in his post. "Firefox 4 Beta introduces a
new audio API to expose the
raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in
HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web. With this new API,
developers can read and write raw audio data within the browser, presenting
audio information in completely new ways that could allow, for example, for
people to visually experience a speech or a song through Firefox."
In addition, with this latest update of Firefox 4 Beta, the browser now
supports the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) protocol for additional
security, enabling sites to automatically direct the browser to an encrypted
connection, Beltzner said.
"HSTS is a new security protocol in Firefox 4 Beta that allows websites
to insist that Firefox always use secured connections," Beltzner said. "Firefox
4 Beta now remembers what sites use the HSTS protocol and will only connect to
those sites using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
in the future, helping to prevent
'man in the middle'
attacks."
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