Firefox 10 Aurora Released, Gets WebGL Anti-Aliasing

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Mozilla just released Aurora 10, the developer version of Firefox that just graduated from nightly status and will move to beta in about six weeks.

Mozilla said that this release will focus on HTML5 enhancements, giving us the feeling that the silent update feature will be pushed to version 11.

Aurora 10 will get WebGL anti-aliasing, support for the HTML5 Visibility API, 3D Transforms, some additions to its developer tools, web workers, DOM and Javascript functionality such as the addition of the battery API. However, we were surprised to see that Mozilla does not list the silent update as a feature for Aurora (Firefox) 10. In its feature tracker, the silent update has been marked as "at risk" and may not make it into version 10 as a result. As controversial as the silent update is among enthusiast Firefox users, there has been little doubt that the mainstream would like to make the update process more convenient, which possibly could convince more users to stay with Firefox.

Another much anticipated feature is not mentioned either - a tool that would automatically import Chrome bookmarks and settings to Firefox. It appears as if this feature will also not surface until version 11 - and is even mentioned as "at risk" for version 11. These two features, as well as a the new home tab (also marked as "at risk" for version 11) are features that Firefox would have needed need yesterday rather than tomorrow to be able to be more competitive with Chrome. At least the silent update support is a must-hit target for version 10.

If you're feeling a little adventurous, but not too much, then check out the download for Firefox 9 beta here.

Wolfgang Gruener
32 Comments Comment from the forums
  • alyoshka
    I thought they just released the final version of 8???????
    Reply
  • HAHAHAHAHA another 1
    Reply
  • JOSHSKORN
    what is a "Developer Version" ?
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    64 bit whar art thou
    Reply
  • s3anister
    I myself have been using Nightly 11.0a1 and having used the recent builds the end user wouldn't even notice a difference between 9/10/11. Only difference is misc. features.

    Not too many issues either. Unless you count that one time Nightly deleted all my bookmarks...
    Reply
  • s3anister
    de5_roy64 bit whar art thou
    There is a 64bit version of firefox out. As far as I know it is only available in the 11.0a1 Nightly flavor.
    http://nightly.mozilla.org/
    Reply
  • amdfangirl
    de5_roy64 bit whar art thou
    Why do you need the 64bit version? Did you run out of RAM in Firefox :P?
    Reply
  • nikorr
    JOSHSKORNwhat is a "Developer Version" ?Still in the development stages, not for regular use. Its not even beta.
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    9325796 said:
    Why do you need the 64bit version? Did you run out of RAM in Firefox :P?
    actually, yes. T_T
    right now i have over 40 tabs open in ff - 40 of them from tom's,
    overall memory load is nearly 60% (2gigs of ram on this ol' pc), cannot multi task. if i try even a little, pc slows down.
    all this with images disabled. if i enable image loading the usage will jump to 70%+, faster slowdown - learned that the hard way.
    i am still clinging to ff, hoping they'll get their memory leak problems right.
    not gonna use chrome, tab sandboxing is nice...but not enough to switch to chrome (or opera).
    Reply
  • randomizer
    alyoshkaI thought they just released the final version of 8???????They did - this is not a final version of anything. Perhaps reading the first line of the article might make things more clear next time.

    This is the only "version" of Aurora that has crashed on me badly. In fact it crashed so badly that it couldn't recover and I wasn't able to start it again. I decided to remove it and install the beta instead. I was in the middle of some important work and running an alpha-grade browser for work is not the smartest decision I've ever made.
    Reply