Once the darling of the web world Firefox has lost a little of its shine of late with many users being lured over to Google’s Chrome browser.
In response the Mozilla Foundation has turned up the heat and is now piling on the changes in an effort to keep up with the competition. Mozilla’s latest offering is a beta version of Firefox 11.
The new version has a healthy number of new features, but will it be enough to hold off Chrome?
One of Firefox 11′s primary promises is to improve cross-platform synchronisation. In particular Firefox Sync now has a feature for synchronising add-ons across multiple platforms. Users can access the feature via the Sync tab in Firefox’s preferences.
The migration tool in Firefox has also been updated. Using this users are now able to import data and preferences from Google Chrome in addition to Internet Explorer and Safari.
For developers there are also new features, including a new 3D view in the Page Inspector. This tool allows developers to view the relationship between various parts of a website in 3D.
Also for developers there is a new Style Editor which can be used to edit CSS files.
Other small changes include the battery API which is is now enabled by default and allows web applications to read battery status.
For those users that are keen to live even closer to the bleeding edge, Mozilla has also released a version of Firefox 12 into the Aurora channel, the group’s very early alpha release channel.
The Aurora releases are very experimental however, and most users will want to at least wait until March 13 when Firefox 12 is scheduled to hit the beta channel before downloading.
Firefox 11 is scheduled to be released on March 13. The beta release is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
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