Firefox 7 is out! Review in few short sentences!

Yup today Mozilla released Firefox 7 and they are definitely following the new release schedule. My first impressions of Firefox 7 is not the design but the performance. In terms of design nothing has been changed but these people have improved the speed. I don't know how much compared to Firefox 5 or 6 but you can definitely feel that they've made our favourite browser faster.

Not only that but the start-up time has been improved as well. Don't know how faster but I'm sure that some people will stop complaining that Firefox starts slow.

Another good thing is that most add-ons which worked with Firefox 6 work great with Firefox 7. You can get Add-ons and Themes by opening the Add-ons Manager, or by visiting the Add-ons Web site. Add-ons installed with previous versions of Firefox may not yet have been updated by their authors to work with this Firefox. If you wish to help test Add-ons, please install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter - your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

Here are the official release notes :

• Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases
• Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
• Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync
• The 'http://' URL prefix is now hidden by default
• 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

Please see the complete list of changes in this version. Web and extension developers should also view the curated list of platform changes. You may also be interested in the list of changes in the previous version.

By far I'm satisfied with the improvements in performance. Good job Firefox developers. Keep up the great work. For all of you who don't like what they are doing all I can say is : If you don't like it don't use it!

Enjoy and have a nice day! : ) Tweet