Firefox 24: The Road to Australis

by Sean Michael Kerner

The most recent stable update for Firefox is version 23, first released Aug. 6. An incremental Firefox 23.0.1 update issued Aug. 16 fixed a trio of bugs in spell-checking, video and audio features.

Compared with its principal rival Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox is available on multiple platforms, including Mac OS X. The Mac version of Firefox 23 principally differs from its Windows counterpart in how the top menu is handled.

Firefox is also widely available on the open-source Linux operating system and is typically the default browser used in multiple Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Ubuntu and SUSE.

Mozilla currently has Firefox 24 available as a preview in its Beta channel. The new release includes the ability for users to “Close Tabs to the Right.” Jared Wein, senior software engineer at Mozilla, wrote in a blog post: “When we open new tabs, they appear on the end, and so naturally tabs that have a longer lifetime end up being promoted to the start-side of the bar. This leads us towards the situation where closing tabs ‘to the right’ is a simple way of closing the ephemeral tabs.”

Another new feature currently in the Beta release is the Browser Console, which provides developers with visibility into what is going on with a given page and its associated elements.

While Firefox 23 and even the Firefox 24 Beta are relatively stable and usable, the Aurora release is an early build of what will eventually become Firefox 25.

It’s still early in the Firefox 25 development process, but at this point, at least one key flaw is set to finally be fixed. Bugzilla bug #483446 details a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) flaw that was first reported in March 2011 and is now set to be fixed with the Firefox 25 release.

The bleeding edge of Mozilla’s Firefox development is now mostly done in the Nightly branch, which is updated Nightly. Currently, the latest Australis interface bits are not present in the regular Nightly release channel.

In order to see some of the possible interface components that the Australis strategy promises, you need to go to the Firefox Nightly UX branch. The new interface includes rounded tabs and a new menu layout.

The Firefox Nightly UX channel release is a place for Mozilla developers to test Australis User Interface ideas. As a Nightly test branch, interface elements shown here won’t necessarily be part of an upcoming browser release. One possibility currently in the mix is a new menu system at the right edge of the navigation bar.