We reported yesterday on the changes coming to Firefox that you can see for yourself in the Firefox 13 beta. It’s the first major change to Firefox in a while that adds loads of improvements including the long awaited new tab page. While a beta is a good look into the future, the Aurora build lets you see even further into the future with the prospective features of Firefox 14
Mozilla showed off the features in Firefox Aurora 14, think dev channel release for Chrome, that may be coming to the official release of Firefox 14 in 12 weeks. The features being shown off in Aurora 14 show that Firefox 14 may be as big of a release as Firefox 13 will be.
Aurora 14 includes some great new features with the first being native fullscreen support in Mac OS X Lion. While you may not ever use the full screen mode in Firefox, I can attest that having native full screen support makes a huge difference. Being able to go full screen natively also means that everything from video to web applications performs well.
Another feature in Aurora 14 is the introduction of the Pointer Lock API. This is another HTML5 Web standard that should help bring more games to HTML5 powered browsers. It’s an API that removes the mouse cursor allowing the application to better handle mouse move coordinates. This is especially helpful in first and third-person shooters.
The four default search paths in Firefox – search bar, address bar, contextual menu and the home page – all now use Google’s https search service. It will increase the privacy of your search without having to visit the actual https Google page.
A big change for dev tools is that you can now inspect pseudo-classes states much easier. Just hover any Web element while in dev tools mode and Firefox will list all the different states of said element.
Aurora 14 also sees a giant list of improvements from DevTools to Layout. Here are the biggest ones: new keyboard shortcuts in the Source Editor JS module, DOM bindings for non-list objects, an optional plugins.click_to_play option for better security, SVG performance improvements, the site identity change that was in Nightly is now here, the IE and Safari migration tools are now written in JavaScript, and multiple WebGL bugs have been fixed.
The above fixes are just what I found to be the big changes. There are many more listed on the blog post. Check it out to see all the changes coming to Aurora 14. If you wish, you can start test driving the future of Firefox right now. Mozilla really does appreciate the feedback and you will help determine what gets into the beta release.