14 DAY TRIAL // It's not just user facing features in Firefox 13 Beta, much like Firefox 12 before it, there's plenty going on behind the hood and developers in particular are in for a treat. On the one hand, SPDY is now finally enabled by default in Firefox. On the other, Firefox's dev tools are getting better and better.
SPDY is now the default
SPDY is a new protocol designed to enhance though not replace HTTP. It's on its way to becoming the foundation for the upcoming HTTP 2.0 and enjoys wide support from the industry, even Microsoft is behind it, albeit with some additions.
SPDY, as the name suggests, is designed to speed up the internet by optimizing HTTP requests making them more suited for the network speeds and conditions of today.
Firefox 11 was the first to boast support for SPDY, but it was disabled by default as Mozilla continued to polish the implementation and iron out the bugs.
But don't get too used to it, SPDY is in flux and in active development and the third revision of the draft specifications is already being implemented by Google. Chrome already supports SPDY/3 in some fashion and Google sites use it as well.
Dev tools are getting better
Mozilla continues to focus on its developer tools, which were only introduced a few months ago. Already, they're quite useful even though Mozilla has a lot more work to do, especially in some areas.
"Firefox Beta includes a number of improvements to Web Developer Tools. Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements and Style Editor now saves CSS files loaded via file:// URLs without prompting to make the workflow for experimenting with CSS much quicker," Mozilla listed some of the improvements.
