The past few releases of Firefox have been pretty solid as far as new features go, but its latest release is an even bigger step forward.
Firefox 22 launches today, and with it comes WebRTC support alongside new tools that will make HTML5 games an even more viable alternative to Flash and Unity-based Web games. It also features a number of smaller fixes that improve the experience for Windows and Mac OS X users.
First up is WebRTC – a new HTML5 standard for voice and video communication over the net. In essence, it’s Skype for your Web browser, but completely open source and possibly free of NSA snooping. The new communication standard has been available in Firefox for a while, but the latest release marks the first time that it’s been enabled by default. Check out Mozilla’s post on it to learn more.
For gamers and game developers, Firefox 22 introduces a “supercharged subset of JavaScript (asm.js) that enables developers to create high-intensity applications, like 3D games and photo processing, directly on the Web.” Mozilla showed this off earlier this year with an Unreal Engine 3 demo running natively in Firefox without any additional plugin support:
The smaller updates include better scaling options on Windows machines, a new Download progress in Dock application icon on Mac OS X, and the ability to change HTML5 audio/video playback rate.
For more info on the latest release, including developer updates, check out the full changelog.
Desktop users can grab Firefox 22 here, and Android users can grab Firefox 22 for Mobile here.