The latest Firefox is a minor update at best, most of the changes are under the hood

Apr 25, 2012 11:50 GMT  ·  By

Firefox 12 is out and, as we expected, it's probably the most unassuming release to date. There's really not much to say about it, there are plenty of fixes and updates under the hood, as usual, but users will be hard pressed to notice anything new about the latest release.

Still, Firefox 12 is making its way through the update channels and should be landing on your computer soon enough if it hasn't already.

The one new feature worth talking about is the removal of the UAC prompt for each minor update, which you'll only notice, or rather "not" notice, the next time Firefox is updated.

To get rid of the unnecessary hassle Mozilla uses a Windows service that runs in the background and handles updates. It's always running but there is no performance impact, Google uses the same method for Google Chrome.

The other changes and fixes aren't really worth mentioning. However, developers may find more to like in Firefox 12, there's no big new dev tool feature, but there are plenty of improvements and fixes.

Mozilla lists some 89 changes to the set of dev tools it's been building for a few months now. Already, the tools are quite interesting and quite useful. Mozilla is adding more and improving what's there with each release, like the 3D source viewer or the new Scratchpad editor with syntax highlight.

One improvement is that the Web Console now displays errors and messages that were created before the console was open, though it does have queue limit. The Scratchpad now supports the Find feature and has the standard CTRL+F shortcut bound to it as well as the Jump to Line feature with the CTRL+J shortcut.

The Style Editor now supports CSS transitions and adds a closing brace for new rules added to stop them from interfering with the rest of the code.

There are plenty more changes but, if you're not a developer, it's nothing to get excited about. What's more, the upcoming Firefox 13, which is currently in Aurora and should be moving up to the Beta channel soon, doesn't really promise that many changes as well. It may be that Firefox fans will have to wait until Firefox 14 lands to see some more significant improvements.