Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux has new JavaScript enhancements that make Web browsing significantly faster. The latest update to Firefox includes Type Inference which boosts JavaScript performance and allow rich websites and Web apps with lots of pictures, videos, games and 3D graphics to load and run much faster. Type Inference is a feature of the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that integrates with the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler to provide analysis and help generate more efficient code. Firefox with Type Inference is up to 30% speedier on JavaScript benchmarks like Kraken and V8.

Firefox for Mac OS X Lion supports two-finger swipe gestures so you can easily navigate between websites. Firefox for Mac has an enhanced look and feel that matches the Mac OS X Lion icon and application toolbar styles and makes it easier to browse the Web using multiple monitors.

Web developers will notice Firefox helps websites load much faster, especially sites that download large sets of data or use AJAX. Firefox supports chunking XHR requests, allowing websites to display content as it’s downloaded instead of waiting for the entire download to complete. For more details about the new developer capabilities in Firefox, check out the Firefox for Web developers page.

For more information:

• Download Firefox
• Long, technical release notes
• Future of Firefox
• Firefox for Android

We’re incredibly excited to announce Firefox Flicks, a campaign giving everyone an opportunity to produce short films that highlight what makes Mozilla Firefox different, that we’re a non-profit organization helping keep the power of the Web in people’s hands. We’re encouraging users, fans, filmmakers, animators everywhere to submit high-quality videos that will help more mainstream Internet users learn about the issues that affect their online lives and, more importantly, how Firefox addresses these issues.

Submissions for Firefox Flicks will be accepted February–April 2012 and are divided into four regions: US & Canada, Latin America, Asia and Europe (you can enter no matter where you live and you’ll be associated with the closest region). Anyone can enter —all you need is creativity and a love of Firefox and our philosophy of openness and improving everyone’s online experience.

The short films can be entered into any of four categories:

• Best :30 Spot
• Best Use of New Open Technology (e.g. Popcorn.js, HTML5, etc.)
• Best Animation
• Best Public Service Announcement

We’ll be sharing more details over the coming months, including Hollywood judges, events and prizes for our winning submissions. You can visit www.firefoxflicks.org for more details and be sure to follow our blog and Twitter for upcoming announcements. Check out the videos from the previous Firefox Flicks for some inspiration!

• This is Hot
• Daredevil
• Web For All 
• Billy’s Browser

Today, we are excited to join together as a global community to celebrate the 7th birthday of Firefox. As the only independent browser with a mission to make the Web better, we are proud of how the last seven years of Firefox have pushed the Web forward:

• The latest release of Firefox is more than 32 times faster than Firefox 1.0.
• We recently shifted to a new release cycle to deliver features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster.
• Leading edge HTML5 support in Firefox ensures that developers can create beautiful and exciting Web experiences for users.
• Favorite features like tabbed browsing, built-in phishing and malware protection, the Awesome Bar, Do Not Track and our gallery of thousands of  Firefox add-ons give millions of users around the world more choice and control over their Web browsing experience.

To celebrate, Mozilla has once again adopted firefox (a.k.a red panda) cubs at the Knoxville Zoo. For the next few months, you can watch these baby firefoxes play, live and grow via a 24 hour live video stream at Firefox Live. Please help spread the word by sharing the cuteness of our newest Mozillians at Firefox Live.

Today, we’re releasing an update to Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux and Firefox for Android. This update includes new features that make Web browsing easier and give users and developers more control over how they customize their Web experience.

Firefox for Mac, Windows and Linux
Twitter is now included as a search option in Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux. Twitter search in Firefox makes it easier to discover new topics, #hashtags and @usernames. Twitter search is currently available in English, Portuguese, Slovenian and Japanese versions of Firefox, with more languages to come in future releases.

Firefox lets you load tabs on demand, making it much faster to restore windows with many tabs. Enable this option in the Firefox Menu, under Options/Preferences, in the General tab.

Sometimes you download third-party software and are surprised to discover that an add-on has also installed itself in your browser without asking permission. At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep.

Mozilla pioneered WebGL and introduced it in Firefox earlier this year. WebGL is a new Web standard that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software. Firefox adds support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which lets developers load WebGL textures from other domains in a secure way. To see an example of WebGL in action, visit Google MapsGL and experience 3D maps in Firefox.

Mozilla is a leader in HTML5 and we want to make it easier for developers to create amazing Web experiences. Using simple HTML5 markup, Firefox enables Web developers to customize the options users have in the right click menu and saves them from having to build their own menu. If you’re a Web developer and want to learn more about the awesome features we build into Firefox, just for you, click here.

Firefox for Android
Firefox for Android has new features that put users in control of their mobile Web experience. With Firefox Master Password, you can protect all your saved usernames and passwords. This will help your private info stay private if you ever share or lose your Android device.

We want to make HTML5-based Web apps as easy to use as native apps. Firefox lets Android users add icons for any bookmarked website or Web app to the home screen and launch with just one touch.

For more information:

• Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux long, technical release notes
• Firefox for Android long, technical release notes
• Download Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Download Firefox for Android
• Find out more about the Future of Firefox
• FAQ

Mozilla and Bing are pleased to make available Firefox with Bing, a customized version of Firefox that sets Bing as the default search engine in the search box and AwesomeBar and makes Bing.com the default home page.  (Existing Firefox users can also make these changes by installing the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on).

Offering Firefox with Bing extends the partnership Mozilla and Microsoft announced last year.

There are nearly 20 customized versions of Firefox distributed globally by partners including Bing, United Internet, Twitter, Yahoo! and Yandex.

Mozilla, a global, non-profit organization dedicated to making the Web better, today released an update to Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux. Mozilla Firefox provides a speedy Web browsing experience for users and new tools to help developers create faster websites and Web apps.

Firefox manages memory more efficiently to deliver a nimble Web browsing experience. Users will notice Firefox is faster at opening new tabs, clicking on menu items and buttons on websites. Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days.

New tools in Firefox make it easier for developers to build snappy Web experiences for users. A new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas speeds up HTML5 animations and games in Firefox. This allows developers to build more compelling and interactive Web experiences like Angry Birds or Runfield.

Firefox now supports the W3C navigation timing spec API so developers can measure page load time and website navigation against bandwidth speed, website traffic and other factors. This API allows developers to test user experiences remotely and easily and quickly optimize websites and Web apps for different types of users.

To help improve future versions of Firefox, users can opt in to Telemetry. Telemetry is a tool built on Mozilla Privacy Principles that allows users to provide anonymous browser performance data in a private and secure way that they control.

For more information:

• FAQ
• Long, technical release notes
• Firefox for Android
• Find out more about the Future of Firefox

Mozilla recently re-established the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. We want to share an update after just a few weeks of the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group being been back in action.

Following initial discussions with the group about the Firefox release cycle and how enterprises can use Firefox with individual testing and release cycles, members of the group incorporated the input into a proposal to share. The proposal for extended support incorporates ideas and feedback to address the pain points of enterprise Firefox users. We would like to gather additional feedback from enterprises in the coming weeks to turn this proposal into a plan.

We look forward to hearing from enterprise users and IT managers from organizations of all sizes. If you have any feedback, questions, or are interested in participating, please email us.

Mozilla, a global, non-profit organization dedicated to making the Web better, today released an update to Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux that includes new and enhanced tools to make developing for the Web faster and easier.

The new “Web Developer” menu in Firefox provides easy access to tools that help developers build and debug websites directly in the browser. Developers will enjoy the new Scratchpad tool, which makes it simple to quickly enter, execute, test and refine JavaScript snippets in Firefox without needing to work in a one-line console. The Web Console is improved with an auto-complete feature and the ability to customize the console’s location to save developers time.

With support for additional APIs in Firefox, developers can build rich and compelling Web experiences. The new Window.matchMedia API helps developers optimize their website or Web app across different devices and platforms. Prefixed WebSockets and server-sent event APIs create faster communication between Firefox and Web servers, making it easier for developers to build more responsive and interactive real-time messaging applications and HTML5 games on the Web.

Panorama users will enjoy faster start-up times because tab groups are only loaded when selected. Users will also notice the Awesome Bar (URL bar) highlights a website’s domain name and the identity block is more prominent to help quickly identify where you are on the Web.

To get the latest version of Firefox for Windows, Mac or Linux click on “check for update” under the “About Firefox” menu or look out for a prompt to update automatically in the next few days.

For more information:

• Long, technical release notes
• Firefox for Android
• Find out more about the Future of Firefox
• FAQ

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are. To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.

Discussions will preserve the privacy of the participants to facilitate open discussion of best practices and issues companies are facing. Summaries of the discussions will be made public so that everyone can benefit from them.

We look forward to hearing from enterprise users and IT managers from organizations of all sizes. If you are interested in participating, please email us.

Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, for whom the Web has become such an important part of their daily lives.  Providing updates to Firefox more frequently allows us to secure users against emerging threats and provide the platform for innovation that today’s rich and compelling Web experiences demand.

The Mozilla Community has focused our efforts on the needs of the individual user, and prioritized the product roadmap and features accordingly. However, as is the case with many technologies, loyal Firefox users and their IT departments have sought to bring Firefox into their places of work.

A key challenge for enterprises is that they need to certify their websites, apps and add-ons each time Firefox is updated. This can take weeks or months. Security is also paramount, enterprises need access to a version that includes all known security fixes.

We are exploring solutions that balance these needs, with active discussion in our community.  Open Source software is well-suited to these challenges, as interested parties can come together to build what is needed.

We look forward to continuing the dialog, and will post updates as they become available.