14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 7 is here, bringing with it big memory usage improvements and several new features like telemetry, some AwesomeBar tweaks and so on. Developers will be more interested about what's under the hood though.
And there are plenty of new things for them as well. Firefox 7 brings updated support for WebSockets, now in the mobile version as well, which was reintroduced in Firefox 6.
The latest general release also introduces support for the 'ellipsis' mode of text-overflow, which will make it a lot easier to manage large pieces of text.
"Today we’re releasing Firefox Update 7. This update contains work that’s been stabilizing over the last 3 months and there are quite a few interesting things to talk about," Mozilla announced.
"WebSockets is now enabled by default for Firefox for Mobile. For mobile networks that are high-latency and have high connection setup-up costs, WebSockets offers an opportunity to create a much better experience than is available with polling HTTP," Mozilla explained.
"We’ve [also] updated to the most recent draft version of the WebSockets protocol from the IETF," it said.
Since the revamped WebSockets protocol is still in draft mode, support in Firefox is not final, so any use has to be prefixed by "moz-".
Text-overflow now supports ellipsis mode, which means that text will be abbreviated to fit inside any element, no matter how small. This makes it possible to stop worrying about how large text will fit.
Firefox 7 also comes with a new limitation, one that most users will probably enjoy, pages will no longer be able to resize a window, except in certain circumstances.
"You can’t resize a window or tab that wasn’t created by window.open," Mozilla says. "You can’t resize a window or tab when it’s in a window with more than one tab."
For a more thorough list of changes and updates of interest to developers in Firefox 7, you can check out this Mozilla Developers page.