Mozilla has just released Firefox 19 for users of the Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, and among a plethora of new features comes an in-built PDF viewer. Since increasing its release schedule, Mozilla has stuck almost religiously to its six-week cycles, and although it’s rare – in software terms – to see a whole number update pertaining to only a few minor changes, it helps Mozilla keep up with Google’s rampant Chrome browser.
As well as the PDF viewer, which was perhaps long overdue given its presence in the majority of other Web-surfing clients, Firefox 19 brings startup performance improvements at user level. If you’re a developer, there are several significant alterations: the Remote Web Console is available for connecting to Firefox on Android or Firefox OS, for example. The Firefox OS reflects the mobile iterations of Ubuntu in that a predominantly desktop-based company is hitting the smartphone scene, and from what we’ve seen and heard so far, it looks promising indeed, so if you wish to attune yourself with Firefox OS at this early stage, you’ll want this new Firefox update.
There are a bunch of bug fixes also included in this release, such as the issue where starting Firefox with -private flag was wrongly claiming the user was not in Private Browsing mode.
At this point in time, the new version is live on the official Firefox site. However, if you’re on an older version of Firefox, 18 for example, then you should get the update over the air, in the background, and you’ll be up to speed in a matter of minutes.
If you don’t see the update yet, then don’t panic, Firefox 19 will appear on the official site over at Firefox.com once it has propagated worldwide, and if you prefer, you’ll be able to update using the in-app update feature, as mentioned earlier.
After playing around with the final build for a while, we have to say that Mozilla is definitely making a lot of improvements as time is progressing. We’re expecting bigger and stronger features to make their debut in the upcoming versions of Firefox.
Apart from the desktop version of Firefox, the Android version has also been updated, and now supports themes and the processor requirement has been lowered from 800 to 600MHz. The update can be grabbed from the Play Store.
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