Firefox 10 Beta Arrives Looking Just Like Firefox 9

Posted 12/26/2011 at 7:00am | by Paul Lilly

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Depending on whose numbers you trust, Mozilla's Firefox browser is either the world's second (NetMarketShare) or third (StatCounter) most popular in the world, ahead or behind of Google Chrome. Either way, Mozilla is keeping busy kicking out new builds as part of its rapid release schedule, and if you're a beta user, you can now get your mitts on Firefox 10.

Visually Firefox 10 looks identical to Firefox 9 at a glance, though if you look close, you'll notice the foward button is now hidden and only appears when you navigate back. Other changes are equally subtle or hidden underneath the hood. Highlights include:

• Anti-Aliasing for WebGL is now implemented
• Full Screen APIs allow you to build a Web application that runs full screen
• CSS3 3D-Transforms are now supported
• New <bdi> element for bi-directional text isolation, along with supporting CSS properties
• Inspect tool with content highlighting, includes new CSS Style Inspector
• Mozilla added IndexedDB APIs to more closely match the specification
• Resolved an issue where some users may experience a crash when moving bookmarks

There are some bugs Mozilla has yet to squash, such as the inability for some synaptic touchpads to vertical scroll, jerky scrolling and text input under "certain conditions," and incompatibility with Mac hardware with Power PC CPUs.

You can download beta builds of Firefox here.