14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has officially released the Firefox 30 version of the Internet browser and the binary files are now available for download, although the release notes haven't been published yet.
Firefox 30 is not a terribly exciting release, but like all previous versions of this Internet browser, it does bring a few interesting features, including support for GStreamer 1.0, at least for the Linux version of the application.
This particular change has been a long time coming and, in fact, it should have been implemented a lot sooner. The Gstream 1.0 branch has been around for ages and Firefox is probably one of the last major pieces of software that chose to finally support it.
A number of other changes and improvements have been implemented, according to the release notes for the Beta version. For example, the sidebar button now provides easier access to the social, bookmark, and history sidebars, it's no longer possible to call WebIDL constructors as functions on the web, plugins will no longer be activated by default (with the exceptions of the ones on the whitelist), and mute and volume functions are now available for each window (only with WebAudio).
Also, background-blend-mode has been enabled by default, typedArrays now supports new named properties, and the alpha option is now available in the canvas context options.
The Firefox whitelist has only a handful of plugins approved, which means that most of the new plugins that users will be installing won't work from the start.
If you are using a Linux distribution, you don't have to do anything in order to get this new version. It's very likely that Firefox 30 will arrive in the repositories, if it's not already available. Some of the operating systems will get it faster, like Arch Linux, for example, and for others it will take a couple of days.
As always, the binaries for Mozilla Firefox 30 can be downloaded and run without having to install anything. Be careful though, because you might encounter problems if you run two different versions of the same application.
Mozilla will eventually publish the details about this release but, until then, if you are really interested in the changes, you can check the release notes, when they become available.
It's also worthy to note that the Australis interface is still in place and it's not going anywhere. Those of you who thought that Mozilla might back down from Australis in future versions will be disappointed.
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