Firefox 11 – One Small Step for Devs

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Mozilla recently launched Firefox 11, which brings a number of significant user features and some welcome technical tweaks behind the scenes. Firefox 10 was launched only this January, appearing with a whole new toolbox for web developers. The integrated browser tools have been further improved in the latest release.

A new Style Editor offers devs a dual-panel view allowing them to scan the inline or external stylesheets of any web page, complete with syntax highlighting for easy pinpointing of rogue or novel elements. Also very useful is the instant updating feature, which reflect changes to stylesheets on the web page in the left-hand panel as the user types. No Ctrl+F5 or mouse shenanigans. It means two or three key presses can be enough to try out a whole new style. Actually Firefox 10 supported live stylesheet editing, though devs were presented with a table of properties for each stylesheet rather than the actual text entered as code. The whole thing further enhances Firefox’s reputation as the developers’ browser of choice, and hopefully will make catering to all the various resolutions of every possible device that much easier.

Another new feature in Firefox 11 is the 3D representation of a page’s DOM tree – that’s the hierarchical map of all the page’s elements; images, paragraphs, side columns, you name it.

The new tool displays all those various tags not as blocks of text but as a heap of blocks, graphically depicting the overall structure of any page. Devs can zoom in or rotate the 3D representation to best suit them. Admittedly the 3D visualiation tool has been available in test developer versions for a while, and it should save software companies a few bucks in optician’s bills in the long run, now that those frantic late-night bug searches have gotten a whooooole lot easier.

Firefox 11 also includes beta support for SPDY, an alternative to the web standard HTTP protocol. The SPDY protocol gives performance benefits compared to HTTP . Firefox 11 now allows users to import bookmarks and history from Google’s Chrome browser. Users can download Firefox 11 from Mozilla’s website, and users of older versions will soon receive an automated update.

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