Firefox for Windows 8

Firefox for Windows 8 – Most Important Features

                Microsoft will officially launch the Windows 8 on October 25 and the engineers working on Firefox at Mozilla Inc. are surely getting busier than ever before. Brian Bondy of Mozilla posted a few details of the upcoming ‘metro-enabled’ Firefox for Windows 8 platform. The features are still being worked on and the current status of the development is ‘beta’. The preview is meant to be installed on the Windows 8 RTM and built with the PGO (profile-guided) optimizations turned off; so it’s expected that the version will be slower.

 

The Firefox Metro preview is enabled to receive the nightly updates. So you can try out all the new features and fixes as and when they are made available. Let’s take a quick look at the most important features present in the Firefox for Windows 8 (metro).

• The installer is capable of integrating with the metro browser on Windows 8

• The new navigation url is inspired from the australis theme

• Tab bar shows tab previews – you’ll need a double swipe at the top or bottom to load the previews

• There’s an alternate tab-bar that keeps the previews all the time

• Auto-complete URLs with suggestions as you type

• The start screen (with tiles) is optimised for touch-screen devices

• The changes made to the default theme will reflect in the metro interface

• New touch capabilities and keyboard short-cuts along with gestures

• On the screen keyboard handling made easier and more intuitive

• In-page text selection, telemetry support

• Easy Firefox crash reporting

• Context sensitive handling of links. If in metro interface, the links will open in metro

• Synching features – to synchronise your FF browser installations across multiple devices

• PDF views inbuilt by using Javascript

• Automatic spelling checker

With Windows 8, the metro browser can only be used if it’s set to default. You can do so from Firefox -> Options -> Advanced -> General tab -> Click “Make Firefox the default browser” button. The flash support is currently disabled. Most important thing to note is that the add-on support is disabled in the preview, but will make a reentry with the gold version soon.