Games,Softwares

Review:

Mozilla Firefox has undergone an enormous rebirth over the past two years. Since Firefox 4 debuted in March 2011, the browser has been hell-bent on improvements. These have come in large part on the rapid-release cycle, which sees a new version of Firefox every six weeks. Many people like them, but a vocal minority has pooh-poohed the increase in version numbers. That's hardly a legitimate complaint in a world where mobile apps also update silently and effectively, but the transition for Firefox hasn't been an easy one. 

As you can see, Firefox is on version 19 at the time of this review. As a point of comparison, Chrome is currently on version 24 even though it launched only in 2008. The benefit of rapid updates, of course, is a browser that is safer and sleeker, with fewer problems because bugs get fixed on a regular basis.

The Firefox that you can download now is in the same speed category as its competition; offers many similar features (stronger in some areas and slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support for hardware acceleration and other "future Web" tech and standards; and is a must-have for Android users (download for Android).

Recent changes have locked down memory leaks caused by add-ons, long browsing sessions, and heavy tab usage. Mozilla released data showing huge gains in recovering memory with a shocking 150 tabs open, so you're likely to see big gains with far fewer. There's also been the introduction of a Social API, for direct hooks into Facebook. Other social networks like Twitter are in the works, apparently.

In this version of Firefox, the browser matches Chrome's built-in PDF reader with one of its own. If you have a separate PDF-reading add-on for the browser, you can disable that now.

It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox available at the moment, and this review only addresses the stable branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels -- Firefox beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for Windows | Mac | Linux); and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly Firefox Minefield (download for all versions) -- are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.