14 DAY TRIAL // With Firefox 9 made available to all just before Christmas, the other Mozilla Firefox channels also welcomed new versions. Firefox 11 landed in the Aurora channel, the most experimental versions aimed at regular users.
It comes with several new features and more may be added or completed during this development phase, over the next six weeks.
Of course, if things don't go as planned, some of the features in testing may be dropped before Firefox 11 moves to the Beta channel.
Google Chrome migration tool
A feature that should prove handy in some cases, support for Google Chrome in the history and bookmarks migration tool has been introduced.
This makes it possible to switch from Chrome to Firefox and continue where you left off, with all of your favorite or most visited sites ready for you to use.
It may not seem like that many people would be switching from Chrome to Firefox, but with the two browsers having roughly the same market share, migration to and from any of the two is quite common. Chrome has always been able to import Firefox data, so Mozilla is simply returning the favor.
No more UAC popups when updating
Firefox 11 comes with a major milestone towards Mozilla's goal of completely silent updates, at least on the Windows platform. The UAC dialog no longer pops up when updating Firefox, eliminating one of the hassles in the process.
Redesigned media player controls
The media controls for the built-in video player have been redesigned. Mozilla developers have been working on this for a while, but the new look is available in Firefox 11.
Firefox 10 introduced full-screen APIs which enable the player to use the entire screen for the video. To make use of this new feature, the player got a "full screen" button as well.
SPDY and CSS text-size-adjust
There is now preliminary support for the SPDY protocol, but it is not enabled by default. Developers and users that want to test the implementation can enable the feature and see how it performs in the real world.
Firefox 11 supports the text-size-adjust CSS property, allowing web designers more control over the look of their websites. The property is used to make sure that the layout and proportions are maintained when the primary font is not available.