14 DAY TRIAL // As has been the norm lately, Firefox 14 Aurora has plenty of new things for web developers. The dev tools are better than ever and Firefox is always adding support for more modern web technologies.
One thing that's new in the latest Aurora is support for fullscreen mode on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. It took Mozilla a while, but it finally got it working properly
Another interesting addition is support for the Pointer Lock API, or mouse lock as it's also known. The feature enables apps or websites running in the browser to capture the mouse cursor and replace it entirely. The feature is purpose built for games, first person shooters being the main beneficiary.
"The dev tools allows now to easily inspect pseudo-classes states: when hovering over an element with the dev tools activated, the contextual menu now lists the different states of the element, like :hover, :active, and :focus," Mozilla explained.
"When selecting one of these items, the element is locked in the associated state and can be inspected. That feature was already there in Aurora 13, but the interface to access it is now very convenient!," it added describing one of the main additions to the dev tools in the latest Aurora 14.
The Source Editor JS module, which is used by both the Scratchpad and the Style Editor has a couple of additions. For one there are new keyboard shortcuts for moving the start of the code block or its ends. Also new is the ability to remove a comment from a line with only one key press.
There are a couple of improvements that should speed things up. On the one hand, an improvement over how character maps are used, specifically overlapping characters in different fonts are shared between them, saves up a bit of memory usage, depending on how many fonts you have installed.
Tabs are now loaded on demand by default, speeding up Firefox startup, especially if you have a lot of tabs open. Finally, the Internet Explorer and the Safari migration tools are now written JavaScript making them easier to maintain. Their usage no longer blocks the browser as well.