A new month and a new version of Mozilla Firefox for us all to get acquainted with.
Over the last few releases Mozilla has been heavy on introducing user-facing changes. v29 introduced the new Australis interface, v30 made plugins click-to-play and last month’s v31 adding a big ol’ search box to the New Tab Page.
‘…faster performance when relaunching the browser after a crash’
Firefox 32 is a modest release. The most notable new features are found buried under the hood, such as the introduction of faster HTTP caching by default. This, Mozilla says, should result in faster performance when loading the browser cold and when relaunching after a crash.
For the security minded this release also marks the debut of a new feature: public key pinning. Key pinning allows “[web]sites to specify which certificate authorities have issued valid certs for that site, and for user-agents to reject TLS connections to those sites if the certificate is not issued by a known-good CA.“
Elsewhere, the password and add-on managers benefit from some performance TLC; the ‘Find Toolbar’ now displays a list of matching items; and the styling of the translation info-bar now looks better on Linux.
Developers will find a slew of HTML5 improvements, including Vibration API updated to latest W3C spec, plus HiDPI support in the dev tools interface, a new web audio editor and code competition and a whole lot more.
Firefox 32 for Ubuntu
If you’re running Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04 LTS you don’t need to do a thing to upgrade. Firefox 32 will arrive on Ubuntu through the Software Updater tool in the next 24 hours or so.
Those on an older or unsupported platform, an alternative distribution, or are just otherwise impatient to upgrade, the official Mozilla Firefox website has all the relevant download links.
Though not as stylish as our Google Chrome extension, our Firefox Add-On is compatible with the latest release.
- Source: Mozilla, via TNW