Firefox 10 Beta Is Here, What You Need to Know

With Firefox 9 launched and made available to everyone, all of the other Firefox versions, further upstream, will migrate to a new channel. Already, Firefox 10 has landed in the Beta channel, from Aurora.

As is the norm, there are no huge changes or new features in Firefox 10, but there are a few interesting additions.

The Full Screen API in particular is very interesting, since it opens up the door to a lot of applications and new functionality. An hotfix add-on system, which should be built into Firefox 10 is also a novel approach to a common problem.

The Forward button has been removed

Firefox 10 introduced a simple but effective design tweak. The forward navigation button is now hidden by default. This saves up some space in the UI and removes an unneeded element from the toolbar.

However, the button becomes visible as soon as you hit the back button. There is no loss of functionality, but you gain a bit more space, that you're going to be using most of the time, for the address bar or for toolbar add-ons.

Anti-aliasing for WebGL

Also new in Firefox 10, WebGL rendering now supports Anti-Aliasing. This should mean smoother graphics and could come in particularly handy if you're designing UI elements with WebGL, for example, not that this is something you're going to want to do too often.

Full Screen APIs for video and games

A big addition in the Firefox beta is the Full Screen API. It is very useful for online video, it is already being used in the Firefox 10 version of the HTML5 video player. Being unable to go to full screen to watch a video was one of the common complaints about HTML5 video.

The second big use for the feature is games. Again, being able to take over the entire screen is very important for games and HTML5 gaming should benefit from the new feature.

Gorgeous new web inspector tool for HTML and CSS

Firefox 10 also comes with a brand new Inspector tool. It's very flashy and good looking, but also fairly practical. Developers will be enjoying the new tool which was one of the big things missing from Firefox's developer tools set.

CSS3 3D-Transforms are supported in the latest Firefox beta which also adds support for the <bdi> HTML5 element. Chrome 17 added support for <bdi> as well.