queens511
Age: 39
Joined: 10 May 2012
Posts: 40
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With Firefox 13 in the stable channel and Firefox 14 in beta, it was Firefox 15's turn to make the jump. Aurora users are now getting updated to the latest version of the browser that has spent the last six weeks in active development in the Nightly channel.
Mozilla has released Firefox 15 for PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The most standout features are a completely silent background updater (like Chrome), significant memory footprint improvements, a built-in PDF reader, better SPDY protocol support, and a new native UI for Firefox Mobile on Android tablets.
Mozilla debuted an early version of the background updater in Firefox 12, but it still harried the user with various pop-ups. With Firefox 15, the browser now downloads and applies updates in the background, and then switches to the new version the next time you open the browser — just like Google Chrome.
The Firefox add-on memory leak has finally been fixed. For almost as long as I can remember, the only surefire way to reduce Firefox’s bloated memory footprint was to close it down. In theory, closing tabs should have the same effect — forcing add-ons to relinquish their memory allocations — but until now it hasn’t. Your mileage will vary, depending on which add-ons you use, but in general you should notice quite a big reduction.
The built-in PDF reader (pictured below), provided by PDF.js, is turned off by default but can be turned on by visiting about:config and setting pdfjs.disabled to false. After some preliminary testing, it seems about as capable as Chrome’s built-in PDF reader, but a bit slower. This is just a preliminary implementation though — it might speed up by the time final code ships in a later version.
The viewer itself is mostly done, as it's able to render most PDF files at this point. In the latest update though, the team introduced a brand new and much more spiffy UI.
The new black UI certainly looks a lot better than the first iterations, though there aren't that many changes when it comes to features or layout.
The new UI though feels much more like a part of Firefox, it uses the same dark background that Firefox uses when displaying single images or videos and employs the same style of buttons as the toolbar.
The impressive part about the built-in PDF viewer in Firefox is that it's all built with JavaScript. It's open source too, of course, meaning that the technology behind it can make its way into plenty of apps or websites.
Now we could open pdf files with Firefox 15, for password protected pdf files, we also need to unlock pdf files first. If you have forgotten the password, you should crack pdf password to open password protected pdf files.
The update to SPDY v3 brings Firefox 15 back into line with Chrome, which rolled out SPDY v3 in Chrome 19. SPDY is Google’s updated version of HTTP, and a direct competitor of Microsoft’s HTTP S&M. Both SPDY and S&M bring new and much-needed functionality to the very old HTTP spec, such as multiplexing, improved security, and modes that better support mobile devices. SPDY is an open source spec that can speed up surfing by up to 50%, but at the moment it’s only really used by Google’s web properties — still, you definitely notice the difference when using search or YouTube.
Finally, the desktop version of Firefox 15 has improved WebGL support (and a very cool playable FPS demo, if you want to appreciate what WebGL could do for browser-based games) — and the tablet version of Firefox Mobile has had its interface completely reworked (pictured above).
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