Mozilla Hacks

Firefox Aurora 13 is out – SPDY on by default and a list of other improvements

By Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

Posted on March 19, 2012 in Firefox and Firefox Aurora

We have just released Aurora 13, together with a number of improvements.

Highlights

There are a couple of things we’d like to shine some extra light on here:

SPDY on by default

The SPDY control brings responsive and scalable transport to Firefox. It allows for multiplexing and connection sharing and is SSL only. It will offer faster page loads and better scalability for SPDY-enabled web servers.

Our first implementation was in Firefox 11, but now with Firefox Aurora 13 it is on by default!

User Agent change for Mobile

The preferred way for web sites to offer content depending on the device is to use CSS Media Queries. However, there is a good amount of user agent sniffing still going on out there, so we wanted to make you aware of the change/difference between Firefox on mobile phones and on tablets, as outlined in Mobile and Tablet indicators.

For Firefox on mobile it will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:13.0) Gecko/13.0 Firefox/13.0

Firefox on tablets will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:13.0) Gecko/13.0 Firefox/13.0

List of improvements

Here are all the improvements we’ve made complete with links to each bug listing for those who want to read up more on respective implementation.

DOM

Plugins

JavaScript

Layout

Network

About Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

Technical Evangelist & Editor of Mozilla Hacks. Gives talks & blogs about HTML5, JavaScript & the Open Web. Robert is a strong believer in HTML5 and the Open Web and has been working since 1999 with Front End development for the web - in Sweden and in New York City. He regularly also blogs at http://robertnyman.com and loves to travel and meet people.

More articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]…

13 comments

  1. ohforf

    It seems to me that firefox is becoming more a software to develop webpages and less a browser…

    March 20th, 2012 at 07:58

    1. Robert Nyman

      Is there any specific you are referring to? Basically, all features listed here are there to make web browsing faster and better, and to offer web developers to build richer web sites.

      March 21st, 2012 at 03:05

    2. Capt. Obvious

      If that’s what you think then you need to think the same about IE10, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. They all have had built-in tools like this for a LONG time while Firefox had to rely on the Firebug addon.

      March 23rd, 2012 at 14:40

      1. Robert Nyman

        Yes, all web browsers have developer tools, which I believe is great. Firebug set the standard and definitely also raised the bar for how debugging in the web browser could be done.

        March 23rd, 2012 at 17:26

  2. Jay

    really loved to see SPDY on by default…
    are there any chances of making SPDY, a web standard.
    and UA changes…
    media queries dont work properly on all devices, so this was necessary.

    March 20th, 2012 at 09:44

    1. Robert Nyman

      Yes, it’s a nice step forward.
      The group developing SPDY are working towards a standardization.

      We’re working on UA changes, and the most notable ones in Aurora 13 are the new tab page with the most visited pages for the current user and that the Awesome Bar now auto-completes typed URLs

      March 21st, 2012 at 17:58

  3. Tin Aung Linn

    Yes we value the fast,I am becoming to feel the ffx is more comfort in developing as long as end user development.

    Watching you in Aurora 12.0a2

    March 25th, 2012 at 21:07

    1. Robert Nyman

      Thank you!

      March 29th, 2012 at 11:19

  4. madovsky

    why to delete -moz prefix ?
    now I need to find a solution in all conditions of my scripts to check
    if it’s mozilla under version 13 to allow -moz filters…
    great progress guy, continue like this and maybe in 20 years we will stay
    cool to pass time with my family rather than corrrect and correct css and js

    June 6th, 2012 at 02:55

  5. madovsky

    ok guys, I understand that you have your reasons to clean
    your code, but what’s the sens to remove -moz prefix only on border-radius and border-shadow but not -moz-linear-gradient ?

    June 6th, 2012 at 14:07

  6. veli

    come on, just REMOVE those idiotic profiles so we can finally implement firefox to enterprise environment. MS App-V etc. just hates your profiles.. they just doesn’t work.

    February 20th, 2013 at 12:32

  7. Jimmie Johnson

    Iam still wondring the same old things, like a 64 bit platform on my xp pro 64 bit gigabyte board og 785, with a quad cpu amd phenomanom.

    March 5th, 2013 at 21:33

  8. Jimmie Johnson

    The 64 bit to match my tecnology of 64 bit programs!

    March 5th, 2013 at 21:36

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