Firefox 18 Soon in Aurora Has Better Image Scaling, CSS3 Flexbox and Retina Support

Firefox gets updated every six weeks, so there's no shortage of new features and improvements coming your way. But the really interesting stuff happens a lot sooner than when it reaches the stable channel, if you want to "be" there when it happens, you have to use the Nightly channel.

It's there that new features first land and are tested. Obviously, it's also there that bugs in new features and changes are found, so expect them.

The Nightly channel is aimed more at developers than "enthusiasts," those are better served by Aurora or Beta, but Mozilla has now started highlighting some of the new features as soon as they land in Nightly.

We've actually told you about the most recent developments, but Mozilla has more details. First up, better image scaling, particularly downscaling, is now built into Firefox. Big images will look a lot better when scaled down to fit your screen. 

This is true for all images but could be particularly important as more sites design with Retina displays in mind by using large images and then downscaling them for users with regular displays. Which brings us to the next big addition, support for Retina displays.

In the web tech department, support for the latest iteration of the CSS3 Flexbox draft spec is now built into Firefox 18. Chrome already has support, Opera is getting it soon.

Finally, Firefox added support for transferable objects, part of the HTML5 spec. The idea is to make it possible to pass data objects from one context to another, aka from one web worker to another, without having to copy it, rather by passing the object from one place to the next.

With Firefox 16 freshly landed in the stable channel, hiccups notwithstanding, Firefox 18 should be making its way into the Aurora channel any time now, so consider this a preview of some of the features in the upcoming Firefox 18 Aurora.