Even though Mozilla announced Firefox 6 just over a month ago, Firefox 7 has already been released, bringing improved memory handling efficiency, speed enhancements and more.
Firefox 7 doesn’t contain significant new features, instead mainly focusing on performance improvements. Firefox 7 is faster and less likely to crash than Firefox 6, and (according to Lifehacker) is currently the second fastest browser in existence, following Opera.
The update also changes the appearance of the address bar, removing the visible http:// prefix from web addresses. Firefox 7 also brings some significant advances for developers, with a new version of Canvas to speed up HTLM5 animations and games.
From the release notes:
– 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
– With version 7, Mozilla has also implemented a new usage statistic functionality called Telemetry that will help the company collect usage information (memory, CPU, startup speed) to improve future versions of Firefox.
Firefox 7 is available now, and you can get it either by clicking “About Firefox” from the Firefox menu, or directly from Mozilla here.
