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Thursday, October 29, 2015

Firefox 29 Available For Download, Includes New Australis UI, Other Important Changes

Mozilla has released Firefox 29 (stable) today. The new version includes a new user interface known as Australis, along with many other changes.

The first thing you'll notice when using the latest Firefox 29 with its new Australis UI is that it uses curved tabs and there's a clear distinction between foreground and background tabs.

There's also a new menu and a new customization function which "allows you to prioritize features in the menu, toolbar, and tab bar by simply dragging them to the desired position":

But that's not all: the addon bar was removed (it's content was moved to the navigation bar), the bookmarks icon was merged with the bookmarks button and was moved to the right of the search bar, the forward button only appears when there's somewhere to go forward to and the Firefox menu was moved on the right, at the end of the toolbar, as you can see in the screenshots above.

Other changes include:

An interactive onboarding tour to guide users through new interface changes;
The ability to set up Firefox Sync by creating a Firefox account;
Gamepad API finalized and enabled;
Clicking on a W3C Web Notification will switch to the originating tab;
navigator.plugins is no longer enumerable, for user privacy;
'box-sizing' (dropping the -moz- prefix) implemented;
Console object available in Web Workers;
Promises enabled by default;
SharedWorker enabled by default;
<input type="number"> implemented and enabled;
<input type="color"> implemented and enabled;
Enabled ECMAScript Internationalization API.

New interactive tour (click HERE to access it)

Creating a new Firefox account (for sync)

For more information, see the Firefox 29 release notes.

In the video below, Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox, talks about the new features available in Firefox 29:

(direct video link)

Download Firefox 29

Update for Ubuntu users: Firefox 29 was uploaded to the official Ubuntu (Precise, Quantal, Saucy and Trusty) repositories so run an update - e.g. launch the Software Updater -, and you should get the latest Firefox 29.

Google Chrome Stable (35) For Linux Updated With Aura UI Stack, Notification Center And App Launcher

Google Chrome stable for Linux was updated recently (version 35) with important changes: Aura is now used for the user interface (replacing GTK2) and also, a Notification Center and App Launcher were added though the latter is not enabled by default.

Aura

The latest Google Chrome stable for Linux uses Aura (instead of GTK2, which was previously used), a new graphical stack which was initially used on Chrome OS, then on Chrome for Windows and Mac and now finally on Linux.

Aura handles the rendering, compositing and so on, using the GPU when possible. For technical details, see THIS page.

Notification Center

One of the most important features in this new Google Chrome release for Linux is the Notification Center. This is a place that keeps track of your unread notifications so you don't miss any important notifications.

On Linux, the Notification Center uses a tray icon / appindicator, allowing you to see the unread emails or set the notifications in a "Do not disturb" mode:

From the Chrome Notification Center you can select which website / application is allowed to send desktop notifications:

The Notification Center icon isn't displayed until you receive some notifications. There is a way (most probably a bug) to get the Notification Center icon to be displayed even if you don't have any notifications: press F11 twice.

Another cool new feature that's now available in Chrome for Linux along with the new Notification Center, is the addition of Google Now cards. Or it should be, because even tough this feature used to work for me in Google Chrome dev, it doesn't work in Google Chrome stable on my computer (so the screenshot below is from an old Google Chrome dev version):

Chrome App Launcher

Yet another new feature available on Linux with the latest Google Chrome stable is the App Launcher.

The Chrome App Launcher displays your Chrome apps in a menu that's available outside the browser and you can even pin it to the Unity launcher for instance:

The App Launcher is currently not enabled by default on Google Chrome stable for Linux. To activate it, open chrome://flags in Chrome, search for "Enable the app launcher" and enable it, then restart the browser.

Then, to get the menu to show up, you must install a Chrome packaged app from the web store (you must install an application from the "For Your Desktop" category).

As you can see, at least in my test, the latest Google Chrome stable for Linux is not so stable and there are quite a few glitches, so I'm not exactly satisfied with this release. Here's a round-up (updated):

the Chrome Notification Center icon is not displayed by default and I guess that's the desired behavior but pressing F11 twice reveals the icon when it shouldn't;
the notifications are always displayed on the main monitor in multi-monitors setups;
Google Chrome is missing from Dash on my Ubuntu 14.04 system and couldn't figure out why yet;
while the Google Now cards used to work a while back, they stopped working with the latest Google Chrome stable for Linux, at least for me. Everything is set up correctly on my end since Google Now previously worked on my computer (using Google Chrome dev);
NPAPI support was removed from Google Chrome 35 for Linux (and all the other platforms will soon follow!) - that means that Java (both OpenJDK/JRE and Oracle Java), Silverlight (Pipelight), the old Adobe Flash and any other NPAPI plugins don't work in Google Chrome 35 for Linux.

Did you try the latest Google Chrome stable for Linux? Did you encounter any issues?

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