A new Firefox for Android Beta is now available for download and testing. This beta has a redesigned look that blends in with the Android user interface, performance enhancements and support for third-party plugins like Flash for a better mobile browsing experience.

Firefox for Android Beta has all of the features you know and love like Firefox Sync, add-ons and tabbed browsing, plus a new Awesome Screen and enhancements to startup and response time, graphics performance and panning and zooming.

We are always working on a beta here at Mozilla, but this one is special because we’ve done a lot of extra work to add features, improve performance and address things that make mobile browsing faster and easier.

New Firefox for Android Beta start page

We need your help testing everything from the faster startup and response times to compatibility for specific websites and graphics performance. This beta uses hardware acceleration to improve performance with your favorite Web apps, games or photos. As a beta tester you may experience crashes. If you experience a crash or a website that doesn’t perform well in Firefox for Android Beta, please file a bug here.

Firefox for Android Beta supports a wide range of Android phones from Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 all the way back to Android Froyo 2.2. This beta update is only offered for Android phones and in English at this time, but we’ll add more languages and deliver a new beta for tablets soon.

We need your help as we continue to refine the beta and get the new Firefox for Android ready for the world, so take the beta for a drive on your favorite websites and please file a bug if you have any problems.

For more information:

• Get Firefox for Android Beta
• Detailed release notes

Editor’s note: Sid Stamm recently posted about HTTPS Google Search. The full post is included below:

The latest Firefox Aurora is now available for download and testing!

What’s New in Firefox Aurora:

• Improved Site Identity Manager: To prevent spoofing of an SSL connection with favicons.
• Google Search SSL by Default: Firefox Aurora now enables HTTPS by default for Google searches.
• Opt-in Activation for Plugins: Plugins can now be configured to load on click. This requires activation on about:config.
• See Complete Listing: Firefox Aurora Notes for Windows, Mac, Linux.
• For Developers: Firefox Aurora Hacks.

Try these new experimental features now and start testing.
Download the latest Firefox Aurora and provide feedback. Feedback on these new features help us determine what makes it to beta and final releases.

A new Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux is now available for download and testing. This beta optimizes features to make it easier to get where you want on the Web.

What’s New in Firefox Beta for Users:

• Redesigned Home Page: The Home Page now gives you easy access to Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences with one-click shortcuts.

Home Page

• Redesigned New Tab page: When you open a new tab, you can easily get to your most recently and frequently visited sites. You can also customize, add or remove thumbnails to get to where you want to go in one click.

New Tab page

• Tabs on Demand: Firefox loads tabs on demand when you restore a previous session, which makes it faster to restart Firefox windows with many tabs.

What’s New in Firefox Beta for Web Developers:

• SPDY Support: Firefox Beta now supports SPDY by default. SPDY is a protocol designed as a successor to HTTP that reduces the amount of time it takes for websites to load. SPDY encrypts all communication with SSL, which makes browsing more secure. Users will notice quicker page load speeds on sites that support SPDY networking.
• Developer Tool Updates: Firefox Beta includes a number of improvements to Web Developer Tools. Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements and Style Editor now saves CSS files loaded via file:// URLs without prompting to make the workflow for experimenting with CSS much quicker.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Long, technical release notes for Firefox Beta on Windows, Mac and Linux

After two years of regular updates, we’ll end our support for Firefox 3.6 on April 24th. In the years since Firefox 3.6, we’ve make incredible improvements to Firefox, including phenomenal HTML5 capabilities, Firefox Sync, faster JavaScript performance, support for the Do Not Track header, and an easier, quieter update process. Barring any major stability or security issues found over the next few weeks, Firefox 3.6.28 will be our last 3.6 release.

We strongly advise our users to upgrade from Firefox 3.6, as they will no longer receive critical security updates as of April 24th. In support of Firefox 3.6 users in organizations, we’ve delivered on our promise to implement the Extended Support Release plan three months ahead of ending support for Firefox 3.6. Enterprises and organizations should complete qualification and deployment of the ESR over the next month.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to announce that our minimum supported Windows version will change from Windows 2000 to Windows XP SP2 in Firefox 13. We never change minimum requirements lightly, but this support change allows us to significantly improve Firefox performance on Windows by using a more modern build system. Windows XP users are advised to update to the latest service pack, and Windows 2000 users should consider upgrading ahead of the June release of Firefox 13.

The latest Firefox Aurora is now available for download and testing!

The latest Firefox Aurora is now available, including early-stage features like New Tab, a redesigned default Home Page and Awesome Bar Auto-Complete.

New Tab Feature

What’s New in Firefox Aurora:

• When opening a new tab, users are now presented with thumbnails of their most recent and most frequented pages.
• The redesigned Home Page provides a central start location where users can access their Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences. The new Home Page is an early stage feature; expect more to come in future releases!
• The Awesome Bar now completes URLs as you type them.

Redesigned Home Page

Download the latest Firefox Aurora and provide feedback. Feedback on these new features help us determine what makes it to beta and final releases.

For more information:

• Updates to Firefox Developer Tools
• Platform Updates
• Long, technical release notes

A new Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux is now available for download and testing. This beta makes updating to new versions of Firefox easier and includes more than 85 improvements to in-browser developer tools.

What’s New in Firefox Beta for Users:

• Improved Update Process: We’ve been working to improve the Firefox update experience. Firefox Beta now simplifies the process for Windows users by removing the control dialogue (UAC) pop-up from the update experience.  Once a user gives explicit permission to Firefox on their first installation, they will not be prompted again for subsequent releases.

• Media Controls Refresh: Firefox Beta now includes sleeker HTML5 media controls to enhance the in-browser video and audio playback experience, including full-screen mode.

What’s New in Firefox Beta for Web Developers:

• Developer Tool Improvements: This beta includes more than 85 improvements to Firefox’s built-in developer tools, including updates to the Web Console, Scratchpad, Style Editor, Page Inspector, Style Inspector, HTML View and Page Inspector 3D View.

For more information:

• Get Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Long, technical release notes for Firefox Beta on Windows, Mac and Linux

One of my favourite features in the next version of Firefox, which just hit the beta channel, is the one you’ll never see. In the new Firefox Beta for Windows, we’ve introduced a standalone update service to apply updates in the background. One very happy consequence of this is that our users will no longer see Microsoft’s User Account Control (UAC) warnings.

The UAC warnings in Windows have a noble goal. If you’ve installed software without meaning to, or if something is running without your consent, or if a trusted program has been modified, the UAC prompts shock you out of your normal flow. They dim the whole screen, and grab your attention:

Hard to ignore. Most computer users don’t really understand the technical details behind the warning, which is the whole point. If you don’t know exactly what’s going on, you probably take the safer path and disallow it. The warnings are an effort to improve your security.

Firefox is built to improve your security. We are relentless. Not just in identifying and fixing security bugs, but also in releasing new tools to protect your security and privacy online. Online security moves quickly, which is why we release a new version every six weeks with the latest enhancements.

Unfortunately, the Windows UAC warnings weren’t born in a time of frequent software updates. Every time we update Firefox, the UAC system identifies it as a new or modified program and warns you all over again. Those warnings work against their own purposes; they scare people away from running the most secure software.

In the new Firefox Beta, we use a system level service to apply updates in a way that doesn’t trigger UAC warnings. You get your updates with less hassle and interruption and, when some legitimately scary piece of software is detected by UAC, you’re less likely to have learned to just click it away idly.

None of the work I’m describing here takes away your ability to control updates, of course. You can choose to be prompted for each update if you want, but for most people that’s just a nuisance. And on fresh installs, when Firefox really *is* a new program on the system, UAC will always double check that you actually meant to install it. (You did, didn’t you?)

In the old days we used to make a lot of noise about each release of Firefox. We were proud of the work we’d done and eager to have you to try it out. We’re still incredibly proud of the work we do on Firefox, we’re still eager to have you check it out. But we’d like you to not have to think about releases any more. We want Firefox to just delight you by getting better and better each time you use it. And when you’re not in the mood to be delighted, and just want to get online and get things done, we’ve taken one of the last interruptions out of your way.

Johnathan Nightingale
Senior Director of Firefox Engineering

UPDATE: The security bug reported by ZDI is one we had already identified and fixed through our internal processes. This eliminates the need for us to delay this week’s releases, and we will be shipping them later today. However, in order to understand the impacts of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” fixes, we will initially release Firefox for manual updates only. Once those impacts are understood, we’ll push automatic updates out to all of our users.

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Every six weeks, another Firefox train leaves the station. This week we will release another update, but not on Tuesday as we typically do. There are two reasons for this:

1. This Tuesday is Microsoft’s scheduled monthly update to Windows, and those updates have interacted badly with our updates before. We don’t have reason to expect specific problems with this month’s updates, but we’d rather take a day or two to understand the impact before we update all of our users.
2. We’re also waiting for a report from ZDI about a security vulnerability that may affect this new version of Firefox. We expect to receive the report by end of day Monday. Once we can evaluate the vulnerability, we’ll know whether we need to include a fix in Firefox before the update is released.

We’ll update our post here once the latest version of Firefox is available to the world. In the meantime, if you want to get an advance peek at what’s coming in future versions of Firefox, check out one of our early release channels.

Johnathan Nightingale
Senior Director of Firefox Engineering

Over the last few weeks we worked hard on getting the New Tab feature into Nightly builds. This feature displays a series of thumbnails of your most commonly visited sites (based on your Awesome bar) to make it easier for you to quickly move on to your next task.

We turned the New Tab feature on by default to make it easier for you to test on Aurora. We plan to turn the feature off again on February 16th (next Thursday). You can easily toggle the preference if you want to continue testing it on Aurora past the 16th. Just go to about:preferences and set ‘browser.newtab.url’ preference to ‘about:newtab’, ‘browser.newtabpage.enabled’ to ‘true’ and restart Firefox Aurora.

You can easily file bugs using the following link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=General or read more about the open bugs here bug 455553.

You can also leave your feedback here if that’s easier (#newtab). We’re looking forward to your feedback!