14 DAY TRIAL // Fans of the Firefox web browser have a new beta available for download today, packing the usual bag of fixes and tweaks, mostly under the hood. The 30.0 branch is set to exit Beta next month, but Mozilla plans on rolling out a few more test builds until then.
While not the most unstable build available, Firefox 30 beta does come with its caveats. Trading stability for experimenting with new features and tweaks to existing functions, the beta is targeted at avid users who want to stay in the loop regarding Mozilla’s latest moves.
Changes in Firefox 30 Beta 7 include cleanups and factor out float32 specialization for unary instructions returning, gamepad axes ordered properly, avoiding flattening strings after each concatenation, fixes for live bookmarks still being created despite canceling the subscription, lighter gray for item descriptions, removed padding around list item images, and removed blinking caret in panel text, among other things.
Changes in the browser’s underlying code also instruct the application to not apply the special -moz-hidden-unscrollable clipping on nsTextControlFrame, “since it always has an anonymous scroll frame that deals with overflow,” reads Mozilla’s argument.
Generally speaking, the Beta 30 testing phase includes support for GStreamer 1.0, Mac OS X command-E sets find term to selected text, the Sidebar button gives easier access to social, bookmark, & history sidebars, and calling WebIDL constructors as functions on the web is disallowed.
Fixes are made to box-shadow and other visual overflow elements, mute and volume are available per window when using WebAudio, and background-blend-mode is enabled by default.
Bugs listed as in need for fixing include text rendering Issues on Windows 7 with Platform Update KB2670838 (MSIE 10 Prerequisite), Extended Validation Certificates not displaying, and slow shut downs leading to a warning that states “Firefox is already running.”
Mozilla continues to experiment with tabs. A while ago, the foundation said on its blog, “But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history,” wrote Johnathan Nightingale.
“We’ll test a mix of our own sites and other useful sites on the Web. We’ll mess with the layout. These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable – these tests are not about revenue and none will be collected. Sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value,” added Nightingale.
Download Mozilla Firefox 30 Beta 7 for Mac OS X