WebRTC blasts off. Image: Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work in your browser.

WebRTC support is already baked into Firefox for Android. Both the getUserMedia API and the PeerConnection API — key components of WebRTC and the cornerstones of web-based voice chat — are already supported though you’ll need to enable them in the preferences. See the Mozilla hacks blog for more details.

The same APIs are also now part of desktop Firefox in both the Nightly and Aurora channels. Expect both to make the transition from Nightly to final release as part of Firefox 22 (due some 10 weeks from now).

As Adam Roach, who works on Mozilla’s WebRTC team, writes, with these tools landing and some impressive demos from both the Firefox and Chrome WebRTC teams, “it’s tempting to view WebRTC as ‘almost done,’ and easy to imagine that we’re just sanding down the rough edges right now. As much as I’d love that to be the case, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

That’s part of why Mozilla is asking developers to start experimenting with WebRTC — to help discover what works, what doesn’t and what needs to be better.

“As long as you’re in a position to deal with minor disruptions and changes; if you can handle things not quite working as described; if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and influence the direction WebRTC is going, then we’re ready for you,” writes Roach.

But it isn’t just experimenters that Mozilla is interested in, “for those of you looking to deploy paid services, reliable channels to manage your customer relationships, mission critical applications: we want your feedback too,” says Roach. He goes on to caution that developers should “temper your launch plans.”

Still, while it’s perhaps too early to launch a serious business built around WebRTC, you won’t have to wait long. According to Roach, WebRTC will be “a stable platform that’s well and truly open for business some time next year.”

WebP versus JPEG. Click the image to see the full size examples on Google’s WebP comparison page. Image: Google[/caption]

Want your website to load faster? Slim your images. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

We recently covered how you can cut down your website’s page load times using Google’s image-shrinking WebP format. Unfortunately, one of the downsides to WebP is that only Opera and Chrome support it. But that may be about to change — Firefox is reconsidering its decision to reject WebP.

The change of heart makes sense since most of the objections Firefox developers initially raised about WebP have since been addressed. However, Firefox hasn’t committed to WebP just yet. As Firefox developer Jeff Muizelaar writes on the re-opened bug report, “just to be clear, no decision on adopting WebP has been made. The only thing that has changed is that we’ve just received some more interest from large non-Google web properties which we never really had before.”

Whatever the case, if Firefox does land support for WebP it would help the fledgling format cross the line where more browsers support it than don’t, which tends to be the threshold for wider adoption.

If you’d like to experiment with WebP today, while still providing fallbacks for browsers that don’t support it, be sure to check out our earlier write-up.

Image: Mozilla

The recent release of Firefox 20 means that Mozilla has also updated the various Firefox testing channels — Beta, Aurora and Nightly.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in future versions of Firefox you can grab pre-release versions from Mozilla’s channel downloads page. If you’d like to try out the bleeding edge, you can grab a copy of Firefox Nightly.

Firefox 21 — the current Beta Channel build — features a new option for the Do Not Track privacy header. The Do Not Track header is a proposed web standard for browsers to tell servers that the user does not want to be tracked by advertisers. Instead of the simple “do not track me” or “tracking is okay” options in current releases, Firefox 21 will add a third choice — nothing. That is, starting with Firefox 21, you’ll be able to choose not to decide, effectively turning off the Do Not Track broadcast signal.

Unfortunately, as we’ve highlighted in the past, from a user privacy standpoint Do Not Track is, thus far, pretty much a failure all around. The idea is sound, but because most online ad companies are not planning to interpret the “Do Not Track” header to mean “stop collecting data” and instead plan to simply stop showing you targeted ads, while continuing to collect data and track what you’re doing on the web, whether or not the header is on or off makes little difference to your actual privacy.

Firefox’s Aurora Channel, which has just been updated to Firefox 22, has a more useful privacy enhancement — a setting to only allow cookies from sites you’ve visited. That way you limit cookies (and thus tracking) to sites you actually use.

Aurora will also likely be the first version of Firefox to support the new CSS Flexible Box Model (AKA Flexbox) syntax. See our recent post on using Flexbox for more on how true layout tools promise to change the way web developers work.

Other new features in Aurora include some new developer tools like a font inspector and a download progress indicator in the OS X Dock. See the Firefox 22 release notes for more details.

Provided you’re willing to live with some instability you can grab the latest Firefox Nightlies, which will soon be updated to add some more services to Mozilla’s Social API (currently the Social API only supports Facebook). Unfortunately the new providers aren’t exactly the hottest social networks around, but if you’re using CliqZ, Mixi, MSN Now or Weibo, you’ll soon be able to connect to your friends within Firefox.

Firefox’s various channels are updated every six weeks, which means — assuming no show stopping bugs are found — the features currently in the beta channel will be part of the official release in mid May. Current Aurora features should arrive in final form sometime in early July.

‘Servo,’ bring Firefox into the massive, parallel future. Image: Andreas Levers/Flickr

Mozilla wants future versions of Firefox to be able to “take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures,” writes Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich on the company’s blog. To make that happen Mozilla is developing a new browser engine dubbed Servo.

While Servo is likely several years from being a finished product, it’s an important step in the direction of faster browsers and more capable web apps. Right now you can throw all the cores you want at Firefox, but sadly it won’t be any faster because it isn’t threaded. Servo will help Mozilla build a multi-threaded version of Firefox that will not just speed up the browser, but could enable a whole new class of web apps.

Samsung’s involvement in the project also hints at another reason for Servo — a more powerful engine behind Mozilla’s mobile Firefox OS.

Servo is not an extension of Gecko, Firefox’s current rendering engine, but an entirely new beast written specifically to take advantage of modern, massively parallel processing hardware.

Servo is written in Mozilla’s homegrown Rust programming language, a C++ style language that attempts to provide more security by avoiding memory corruption and buffer overflows, a common attack vector in today’s browsers. Eich calls Rust “safe by default” and says that Rust will stop “entire classes of memory management errors”, helping to eliminate a common cause of not just security flaws, but browser crashes.

As part of the announcement Mozilla has released Rust 0.6, which contains code contributed by Samsung in its effort to port Rust to ARM processors and Android. For more on Rust, check out the project’s website and FAQ or browse the code on GitHub.

It’s going to be a little while, but in a not too distant future Servo may bring a speedy new Firefox to a tablet or phone near you.

Firefox 20 offers an easier way to avoid prying eyes. Image: Andy Roberts/Flickr

Mozilla turned 15 this week and the company is celebrating with a new release of its flagship Firefox web browser.

If you’re already using Firefox the latest version should arrive shortly. If you’d like to take the latest release for a spin, head on over to Mozilla’s download page.

Among the new features in Firefox 20 is a revamped per-window private browsing mode. The new private browsing mode mirrors what you’ll find in Google’s Chrome browser and is really how Firefox’s private browsing mode should have been all along.

Now when you want to start a private browsing session in Firefox you simply select the new “New Private Window” menu option. That will open a new window noting that Firefox will discard any history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files for sites you visit in that window. Any files you download and pages you bookmark will be kept.

The new per-window model is much more intuitive than the old method of private browsing which put your normal browsing session on hold, hid it away somewhere and opened a new, private session. Now it’s easy to have private windows right alongside normal windows, very handy for those who, for example, need to log in to two different Gmail accounts simultaneously.

The other major visible change in Firefox 20 is the redesigned downloads window. Mozilla proposed the new download toolbar button and overlay window design so long ago that Apple’s Safari browser has already long since copied and released its own version.

While Firefox might not be the first to get its proposed downloads interface to the web, it’s welcome nonetheless and alleviates the need to cycle through windows or hit keyboard shortcuts just to see if your downloads are done. The button also helpfully converts to a progress bar when you’re actually downloading something.

To see additional info beyond what’s available in the new overlay, just click the “show all downloads” button at the bottom of the list.

One interesting aspect of the new “Show All Downloads” window is that you may discover your history of downloaded files is larger than you think. If you’ve been clearing your download history by clicking the “Clear List” button in the old downloads window, well, that button was quite literal — it just cleared the list. It didn’t actually remove anything from your downloads history. This can be incredibly good news if you’ve misplaced a file or slightly disconcerting if you thought you were deleting references to any sensitive files you may have downloaded. To really clear your downloads be sure to use Firefox’s “Clear Recent History” menu, which has an option to actually delete everything in your download history.

It’s also worth noting that the new downloads manager works with the private browsing mode as well. You can manage downloads within private windows via a separate downloads interface which is then scrubbed when the private session is closed.

For more details on everything that’s new in the revamped download dialog, read through Firefox developer Mike Conley’s post on the new download manager.

Firefox 20 has a few goodies under the hood for web developers, including support for WebRTC‘s getUserMedia API, which allows developers to access the user’s camera and microphone (with permission) for things like Skype-style video calls. The stable release of Firefox still doesn’t offer full support for WebRTC, but future releases will continue to add more features over time.

For more details on everything that’s new in Firefox 20 — including some speed improvements for page loads and downloads — see Mozilla’s release notes.

A mockup of what it might look like to author your pages right inside Firefox. Image: Paul Rouget.

A few weeks back Mozilla’s Paul Rouget asked developers what they’d like to see in future versions of Firefox’s developer tools. The resulting thread on Hacker News is quite extensive and full of some great ideas that Rouget and others have been hacking on ever since.

The result is a bunch of new tools that are mostly still at the experimental mock-up stage, though a couple are available now in the Nightly Channel if you’d like to try them out.

The most popular request, and by far the coolest of the bunch, is the ability to do live edits in the text editor of your choice — effectively controlling Firefox with your editor. The video below shows an example of live editing via the popular Sublime Edit. This would essentially eliminate the need to jump from your editor to the browser, hit refresh, jump back to your editor, and so on. A dance that most of us are all too familiar with. Perhaps the best part, Rouget says this will work with the mobile version of Firefox as well.

Mozilla is also working on the opposite idea — authoring in the browser. That means putting an editor inside Firefox’s Dev Tools suite. Thus far this idea is less fleshed out, but the possibilities include putting in something like jsFiddle or perhaps a more traditional file-based editor.

Other new tools include some catch up features that bring Firefox’s Dev tools up to speed with what you’ll find in WebKit browsers. Examples include a new network panel prototype and the ability to doc the tools to the right side of the screen — great for wide monitors (this is already available in Nightly). There’s also a new “repaint” view that shows what gets repainted on the page, very useful if you’re trying to improve performance. Rouget has also been working on a new, dark theme for the Firefox dev tools.

Rouget recently added a font inspector panel (available in the Nightly Builds) that makes it easy to see which fonts a page is using, including details like whether or not the font file is local or served through a service like Typekit, as well as the actual @font-face code used.

In what appears to be an unrelated effort, Mozilla developer Dave Townsend has been hacking on Firefox’s Tilt View Tool. Tilt View offers a 3D look at a page that can be very helpful for visualizing the structure of your code and spotting bugs you might otherwise miss. Townsend has come up with a number of ways to extend Tilt, including showing only links and only elements that change on hover.

Townsend even suggests that in the future you might be able to pair Tilt with your site analytics to see which links are most frequently clicked. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait a while before these features are actually available in Firefox; Townsend’s hacks rely on some core Firefox features that aren’t ready for prime time just yet.

While many of these coming features are, as yet, only prototypes, things are clearly looking up for Firefox’s dev tools. For more details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out Rouget’s post, as well as the related Hacker News thread that Rouget has been posting to with some follow up info.

So, so round. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Firefox’s tabs will soon sport a sleeker, rounded design.

The new design will likely arrive in the Nightly Channel in the next few days, but if you’d like to test it today, you can download the Firefox UX branch. Retina MacBook Pro users should note that, thus far, the new curvy tabs don’t support high-DPI screens.

The new curved tabs look like slightly over-sized, more rounded versions of the tabs Google Chrome has always used. Unlike Chrome, tabs in the background are nearly invisible.

The big question is why? Mozilla’s answer seems to be little more than “because we can”. On the plus side, the re-skinned tabs will bring a bit of a speed improvement thanks to new graphic elements and faster “paint” times.

For more details on the speed improvements see Firefox developer Mike Conley’s write up on the new curvy tabs.

Firefox’s new per-window private browsing mode. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Firefox 20, currently six weeks away from a stable release, brings two nice new features to the popular open source browser — per-window private browsing and a new downloads manager.

If you don’t want to wait six weeks for the final version of Firefox 20, head on over to the Beta Channel download page and grab a pre-release copy today.

The per-window private browsing mode mirrors what you’ll find in Google’s Chrome browser and is, frankly, how it should have been all along. When you want to start a private browsing session in Firefox 20 you simply select the new “New Private Window” menu option. That will open a new window noting that Firefox will discard any history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files for sites you visit in that window. Obviously files you download and pages you bookmark will remain.

The new per-window model is much more intuitive than the old method of private browsing which put your normal browsing session on hold, hid it away somewhere and opened a new, private session. Now it’s easy to have private windows right alongside normal windows, very handy for those who, for example, need to log in to two different Gmail accounts simultaneously.

The change does have some potential consequences for Firefox add-ons using the new(ish) SDK. If you’re an add-on developer, head over to the Mozilla Add-ons blog for more details.

The other big change coming in Firefox 20 is the revamped downloads window. Mozilla proposed this download toolbar button and overlay window design so long ago that Apple’s Safari has already long since copied and released its own version.

The new downloads overlay. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

While Firefox might not be the first to get its new downloads interface to the web, it’s welcome nonetheless and alleviates the need to cycle through windows or hit keyboard shortcuts just to see if your downloads are done. If you want more info than is shown in the new overlay (which comes up when you click the toolbar button), the old, separate-window style downloads panel is still available.

For more details on everything that’s new in Firefox 20, be sure to check out Mozilla’s beta release notes.

If advertisers gave you actual cookies while you browsed there would be less resistance. Image: scubadive67/Flickr.

Mozilla has announced that, starting with Firefox 22, the popular open source web browser will begin blocking third-party cookies by default. That means only websites you actually visit will be allowed to set cookies; advertisers on those sites will no longer be able to easily track you by setting a cookie.

While there has long been the option to block third-party cookies, by default Firefox has always allowed them.

Apple’s Safari pioneered the on-by-default approach to third-party cookies and indeed its third-party cookie policy is still more strict than what Mozilla is proposing. Google’s Chrome browser, not surprisingly, allows third-party cookies by default, as does Internet Explorer.

Mozilla developer Jonathan Mayer says the change will “more closely reflect user privacy preferences.” Mayer has set up an FAQ for users and developers, but for the most part, given that Safari has always behaved this way, the changes for developers should be minimal.

The main thing to note as a Firefox user is that the change won’t affect your current settings, nor will it remove any third-party cookies already set. So to get the benefit of the new policy you’ll need to clear out your cookies after you update.

It’s also worth noting that, while blocking third-party cookies is a step in the right direction, if you’re serious about not being tracked while you browse the web you’ll need to take stronger action, installing third-party plugins like Ghostery or DNTMe.

Currently available in the Nightly channel, Firefox 22 is set to arrive in final form in roughly 18 weeks.

Mozilla has released Firefox 19, which features a few modest improvements including a built-in PDF viewer, faster startup times and support for some new web standards.

Firefox users will be automatically updated to the latest version. If you’d like to take Firefox for a spin, head on over to the downloads page.

The biggest news in Firefox 19 is the new, baked-in PDF viewer based on PDF.js. It may not mean the end of those annoying (and untrue) buttons that say “you need Adobe Acrobat to view this file,” but at least you don’t, well, need Acrobat just to view a PDF.

This release will also be a welcome update for anyone who’s ever double-clicked on Firefox, seen nothing happen, double-clicked again and so on until Firefox suddenly comes to life with twenty blank pages open. As of Firefox 19, the browser will not execute any code before the initial window is made visible, which means you click Firefox and you see an open window much faster.

While there are not many new features in Firefox 19, web developers do get some love with support for several new CSS features, including @page, full width text transforms and the new viewport percentage units like vh, vw, vmax and vmin — handy for sizing elements or adjusting type based on viewport size. Just don’t try to use vh and the like with @page because the W3C still hasn’t quite settled how that will work.

For a full list of all the other smaller changes and bug fixes in Firefox 19, check out Mozilla’s release notes.