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.

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