14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 12 is almost here, Mozilla is running it through the final tests for its big release. You can already grab the pre-release builds if you're confident they're free of bugs, but it's better to wait until they're pushed via the official channels.
There's not much to get excited about in Firefox 12, as it's a very incremental release, but there are a couple of interesting updates nonetheless.
For one, updating Firefox on Windows should go a lot smoother thanks to the removal of the UAC prompt. This is part of Mozilla's drive to simplify the update process in Firefox and make it as invisible to the user as possible.
Each small update, a security patch or a new version, required Windows users to allow the install via the User Access Control prompt. Less informed users may have been reluctant to allow the installation to continue.
Firefox now only gets a UAC prompt at the first install. A helper Windows service is installed alongside Firefox, like Chrome does it, which then handles the update process eliminating the requirement for a prompt.
Also new, albeit a little late, are the redesigned HTML5 media controls. Initially slated for Firefox 11, the new buttons in the built-in video and audio player should be available in Firefox 12.
The dev tools have seen some major improvements as well, many small changes, fixes and enhancements, rather than a few big features like in the previous builds. There were some 85 improvements to the dev tools when Firefox 12 hit beta. The Page Source tool now has line numbers for example.
Firefox 12 comes with some enhancements under the hood as well, several CSS3 properties are now supported. The latest Firefox is also adding experimental support for the ECMAScript (JavaScript) 6 Map and Set objects.