Firefox 12 has landed in the Aurora channel, meaning it's the first chance most users get to see it in action. Granted, if you've been using Firefox 11 so far, there's not much to see, the changes, as usual, are incremental.
There's still work to be done, so some changes will land during the six weeks Firefox 12 stays in the Aurora channel.
No more UAC prompts when updating
For Windows users, one big change in the latest Aurora is that they'll see the User Account Control (UAC) prompt a lot less often. Windows will only ask for permission to allow Firefox to install and then to update itself.
After that, all future updates will require no more prompts and will be less of a hassle for the user. Firefox does this by installing an update service, much like Google Chrome.
Smooth scrolling by default
Firefox 12 comes with a change that is going to make a difference for a lot of users, smooth scrolling is now enabled by default. Smooth scrolling ensures that scrolling up and down a web page is not choppy and is done with a continuous motion.
The feature had been built into Firefox for a long time, but it was disabled by default, likely due to some incompatibilities with some pages. There are still some minor issues with the feature on some websites.
Inline auto-complete and automatically downloaded URLs in the download manager
Other small tweaks include inline auto-complete in the Awesomebar. This is yet another feature inspired by Chrome and it comes with advantages - speed, and disadvantages - annoying inaccuracies.
URLs added to the download manager now trigger Firefox to start downloading automatically.
Firefox 12 will spend six weeks in Aurora and then six more weeks in the Beta channel while the new features are refined and some other changes are possibly added.
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