14 DAY TRIAL // Although Mozilla is yet to post Version 7-Final publicly, the latest stable version of the Firefox web browser is now available for download by Mac users.
Featuring no visible changes from the RC build rolled out last week and sporting no Mac-specific enhancements whatsoever, Firefox 7 is indeed as fast as Mozilla promised.
This is most noticeable especially when loading pages that are chock full of HTML5 and Flash.
It eludes me why Mozilla didn’t bother to include support for OS X Lion’s Full Screen function, let alone other Lion features, given that Opera Software and Google have long done so with their own web browsers.
But regardless of what’s not in store for Mac users this time around, we can safely say Firefox 7 is much less of a memory hog than it was when we used to run version 6.0.2 on our Macs.
Not that it was bad, but it ate up so much memory the browser would crash on an hourly basis. Ok, it was bad.
I haven’t had enough time with Firefox 7 to see if these issues are completely gone, but I expect the crashes to be at least less frequent now that memory management has been kicked up a few notches.
In fact, it’s exactly what Mozilla promised with the browser. The new version also drops the 'http' and the trailing slash from the address box, and uses a Telemetry add-on to report memory usage and performance to Mozilla.
As a result of the Firefox 7 betas allowing developers to measure page load time and site navigation (to identify how to make website performance improvements), the application is considerably faster whatever site you’re visiting.
Firefox 7 betas also offered developers an additional way to display CSS 3 text that overflows a layout area, and the latest one leveraged the JavaScript garbage collector to free up memory more frequently.
We’ll be back with the official announcement from Mozilla, hopefully with some good ol’ release notes to confirm what’s new, both inside and out, and not just for Macs, but for all supported platforms.
UPDATE:
And here's the official changelog:
• Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases • Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems • Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync • The ‘http://’ URL prefix is now hidden by default • Added support for text-overflow: ellipsis • Added support for the Web Timing specification • Enhanced support for MathML • The WebSocket protocol has been updated from version 7 to version 8 • Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox • Fixed several stability issues • Fixed several security issues
The complete list of changes can be found here.