Mozilla officially announces Firefox 13

Yesterday it was reported that Mozilla have released Firefox 13 a day ahead of schedule and one was greeted with new features, such as a redesigned home page as well a new tabs on demand feature. Just as predicted, Mozilla have officially announced this build and have shed some light on the features available with this update.

Firefox 13 gets official

In a blog post, Mozilla claims that the new Firefox makes it faster and easier to get where one wants to go on the Web with a redesigned Home Page and New Tab experience. The Home Page now includes icons at the bottom of the page to give one easy access to bookmarks, history, settings, add-ons, downloads and sync preferences with one-click shortcuts. When one opens a new tab, they will see thumbnails of their most recently and frequently visited sites. One can customize the New Tab page by adding or removing thumbnails based on where they go the most.

Elaborating on the improved features, Mozilla states, “Firefox loads tabs on demand when restoring a browsing session to more quickly get you to Web pages. Firefox first loads the tab you are currently viewing, then loads background tabs when you click them. It’s an improvement that makes Firefox start faster and use less memory. This is just one of a series of performance improvements to Firefox responsiveness.”

Introducing an addition to this update, Mozilla states that it now supports SPDY by default to make browsing more secure. They explain by stating, “SPDY is a protocol designed as a successor to HTTP that reduces the amount of time it takes for websites to load. You will notice faster page load times on sites that support SPDY networking, like Google and Twitter.”

Elaborating on this feature, they state the most important goal of SPDY is to transport web content using fewer TCP connections. It does this by multiplexing large numbers of transactions onto one TLS connection. This has much better latency properties than native HTTP/1. When using SPDY a web request practically never has to wait in the browser due to connection limits being exhausted (e.g. the limit of 6 parallel HTTP/1 connections to the same host name). The request is multiplexed onto an existing connection.

To download Firefox on your Mac, Windows or Linux computer, click the link here.