Mozilla has updated the beta distribution channel for its Firefox browser and version 15 is available for download which is full of new products for developers. Program such as debugger is redesigned, an integrated PDF viewer, HTML 5 integration, native support for Opus format and many other things. Find out more details on what this Beta version of Firefox 15 will bring us.
After publishing the final version of Firefox 14 a week ago, the Mozilla Foundation unveils some of the features which will be available in next version which previously was available in the alpha channel Aurora, now it’s moved into Beta. One of the main concerns in this version is again a memory management. The developers had launched the MemShrink to maximize the browser performance and pay more attention to external elements. According to tests made by Mozilla, Firefox 15 corrects the vast majority of memory leaks observed with the existing extensions. Some of the extensions they have mentioned are Adblock Plus, Video DownloadHelper, Greasemonkey, SiteAdvisor and development tool Firebug.
For Firefox 15 Beta, Mozilla announces native support for reading PDF files within the browser. A long-awaited feature that takes advantage of the project PDF.js for HTML5 and JavaScript version of a PDF reader (no native plugin code) which will also enhance browser security. Andreas Gal, initiator of the project, explained in June 2011: “Google’s Chrome browser has trouble allocating a dedicated PDF reader process to avoid injection attacks“. For this reason “an implementation in HTML5 is completely immune against such problems“. This is currently an experimental feature that can be prone to bugs. It offers opportunities to zoom, display thumbnails and bookmarks in a document from a left side panel. Opening a PDF document is supported with the ability to automatically download the document locally from the viewer.
Mozilla also introduces version 3 of the SPDY transfer protocol from Google (recently dubbed by Facebook) as well as optimized WebGL for hardware acceleration. Note also that the JavaScript debugger has been integrated with other development tools. This can be used across a local network to remotely debug apps running on Firefox for Android.
When it comes to HTML, a native support for audio format Opus was added. This is an open source format which gives a better compression than MP3, Ogg or AAC. For Mozilla, Opus is a new format for the future of audio on the Web, especially VoIP, and will be used with WebRTC (future Web standard for audio and video communications in the browser without plugins). The see a complete list of new features which Mozilla Firefox 15 brings visit this link. Also if you want to test a Beta version click here for download.
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