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.

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

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!

The new Firefox Aurora for Android update includes a new native Android interface that we need your help testing. Users will experience a faster start-up time, new design, improved start page and more.  This Firefox Aurora update also includes Flash support. Look for further Firefox Aurora updates soon that will add features like Firefox Sync, additional add-ons support and more.

We need our adventurous group of Firefox Aurora users to help us test these new features and file bugs or provide feedback as we continue to improve performance and features. For tablet users who want to keep using the new optimized tablet UI, please download Firefox Beta.

See the full list of new features in Firefox Aurora for Android: Firefox Aurora Notes for Android

For desktop users, check out the Firefox Aurora notes for Mac, Windows, and Linux/For Developers: Firefox Aurora Hacks Post.

The latest phase of our add-on compatibility plan has arrived in Aurora, and we need your help to test it! Since Firefox 4, we have been automatically making add-ons hosted on AMO compatible with new Firefox releases. Now, we have extended automatic compatibility to non-hosted add-ons, which account for 75% of all add-ons in use (currently in the hundreds of millions). This means you should see less of the incompatible add-ons dialog, and more of your add-ons should just work.

You can read more about the plan, including how we determine eligibility for automatic compatibility here. For additional background reading, check out this blog post.

Once you have Aurora installed, all add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 4 or later can be installed without extra steps. Firefox will install them even if they are declared incompatible in the manifest file.

If you don’t already have Aurora installed, you can get it here. With Aurora, you’ll see our newest features before they go beta, and have a chance to send us feedback before the final release.

Enjoy these new tools, and let us know what you think!

The dialog below should look familiar. It displays while Firefox completes the update process after a new version is installed and the browser is restarted.

In order to update itself, Firefox first starts to download an update in the background. When the update is downloaded, Firefox stages it in a directory ready to be applied. The next time that Firefox is about to start up, it checks out the staging directory. If an update ready to be applied is found, Firefox launches the updater program, and applies the update on top of the existing installation (showing that progress bar as it’s doing its job). When the update process is finished, the updater program restarts Firefox. All of this happens as you’re waiting for your browser to start up in order to do what you wanted to do. This is clearly less than ideal.

For the past few weeks, I have been working on a project to improve this process. The goal of my project is to minimize the amount of time it takes for Firefox to launch after downloading an update. The technical details of how I’m fixing this problem can be found this document. Here’s a short version of how the fix works. When Firefox finishes downloading an update, it launches the updater application in the background without displaying any UI, and applies the update in a new directory that is completely separate from the existing installation directory. Instead of staging the update itself, an entire updated version of Firefox is staged. The next time that Firefox starts up, the existing installation is swapped with the new updated installation which is ready to be used. In this scenario, you likely won’t notice that Firefox has applied an update as no UI is shown.

Now, the reason that this approach fixes the problem is that swapping the directories, unlike the actual process of applying the update, is really fast. We are effectively moving the cost of applying the update to right after the update has been downloaded while the browser is running. This leaves only the really fast copy operation to be performed the next time that the browser starts up.

I have some experimental builds with this feature ready in a temporary channel called Ash. The implementation is now at a stage where it can benefit testing from the community. You can download the latest builds here. I will trigger a few nightly builds on this branch every day so that you would get updates if you’re running an Ash build.

In order to help with testing this new update process, all you need to do is to download the latest build from Ash, then wait a few hours so that a new nightly build becomes available, and then update to that build. Updating can be triggered manually by opening the About dialog, or by the background update checker if you leave the build running for a few hours. If everything works correctly, when you restart Firefox, you should get a new build without seeing any progress bar as Firefox is starting up. In order to verify that you have indeed been updated to a new build, you can go to about:buildconfig, copy its contents, and then compare it with the contents of about:buildconfig when Firefox starts up after an update.

It would be extremely useful if you can test this with different types of security and anti-virus software running. If you observe any problems or warning, or if you see that the update did not change the contents of about:buildconfig, then please let me know so that I can try to fix those problems.

For people who are curious to see the code, I’m doing my development on this branch, and I’m regularly posting patches on bug 307181.

Please note that this is still in the testing stage, and at this point, we’re not quite sure which version of Firefox this will land in (we’re working to land it as soon as is safely possible). No matter which version of Firefox includes this feature for the first time, we believe that this will be a very positive change in making the Firefox update experience more streamlined for all of our users.

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

What’s New in Firefox Aurora:

• Firefox Aurora Notes for Windows, Mac, Linux / For Developers: Firefox Aurora Hacks
• Firefox Aurora Notes for Android

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.

Mozilla’s rapid release process allows us to deliver features, speed optimizations, memory reductions, and much more… faster. Keeping up to date fast is an essential need for the ever changing web.

There is a new release of Firefox every 6 weeks instead of every year. Even with this shortened release cycle, these releases still include major enhancements. These faster updates are possible because Mozilla is growing significantly, and the community of Mozillians at large is growing month over month.

The rapid release process has some very positive side effects, like delivering new web technologies faster, and attracting world class developers who like to see their code ship fast. But rapid releases also have some negative side effects.

One of the negative side effects is that minor annoyances with software updates suddenly become much more noticeable. Most users don’t want to think about software updates nor version numbers and now they are being forced to do so every six weeks.

One such minor annoyance is User Account Control (UAC):

Starting with Windows Vista Microsoft introduced UAC, and with it users across the world see this familiar dialog when doing any operation that requires administrative access:

UAC in particular makes every process run with limited permissions, and if you want to do something like write into Program Files, then the user has to give permissions to the application to do this. This makes things like automated software updates hard to do without user interaction. If we don’t have access to write into Program Files to perform an update, then we have to ask for elevated permissions. We ask for elevated permissions today when applying updates.

If a user with administrative access gives permissions to Firefox one time via a UAC prompt, and that user has automatic updates on, then there is no reason we should continue to ask them to elevate the permissions each and every time we want to apply an update. The user has already explicitly given permission to do it.

If this worries you, just remember that you can change your mind at any time by configuring silent updates on the Options > Advanced > Update tab.

The feature page for this task is located here: Remove requirement for the Windows UAC dialog when applying an update. I am the lead developer on this UAC task and the estimated target is the first quarter of 2012.

What’s being done to solve the UAC annoyance:

There are several ways to tackle this issue. For example, some browsers that offer silent software updates will install into the user’s application data folder and hence do not have this problem. We could do the same, but we chose not to because it can be an administrative headache for some people who manage updates themselves and have to maintain an installation for every user.

We are currently experimenting with a Windows service approach.

This means that an optional component will be installed that automates the software update process better without giving UAC prompts.

Only one Firefox service:

There are four different Firefox development channels you can use. At any time there is a Firefox Release channel, Beta channel, Aurora channel, and Nightly builds channel. These channels give you access to Firefox releases at different stages of the development cycle.

A user can have multiple installations across channels, but only one Firefox service will exist in Windows Services.

Firefox service as an optional component:

The Firefox service will be an optional component. It doesn’t need to be installed, and if it is stopped or disabled, updates will work as they did before in every other recent Firefox release.

A user can also uninstall the Firefox service at any time. Updates will continue to occur using the old method.

Other uses of the Firefox service:

Having a Windows service installed means that we can investigate other integration and maintenance points. The possibilities are very exciting.

The Windows service may be used later on for a wider selection of maintenance related things including faster browser startup via prefetching, but initially will be only for software updates.

High level overview of other new Silent update features

Above I mostly talked about silent updates on Windows, but there are other update issues being addressed in several new features across all platforms. This section was originally written by Robert Strong with help from Chris Lee, and Lawrence Mandel and describes these features.

All of the silent update work can be tracked on the wiki.

Other Mozilla products:

Other Mozilla products may use the service described above. We currently plan to have only one Windows service across all products. All supported architectures are also planned to share the same Windows service.

Every feature described in this post either applies to or can be done for other Mozilla based applications such as SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, and SongBird.

Platform Integration team:

Mozilla started a new Platform Integration team which focuses on issues which need Operating System specific solutions.

I am a member of this new team led by Robert Strong. Some of the tasks being worked on by this team are described above.