Mozilla Firefox for Windows Vista 2012

 

The bottom line: Firefox 13 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of Firefox's competition, too.

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 13, as is this Firefox How To collection, even though it features Firefox 4.

Firefox reborn in version 4
Free Version Mozilla

• Review:

For those of you who spent last year away from the Internet, it's the year that Firefox went from annual major-point updates to a Chrome-style quick-release cycle. How quick? A new major version number along with a spate of performance and feature improvements lands in the Firefox stable version every six weeks. So, Firefox is on version 13 at the time of this review. As a point of comparison, Chrome is currently on version 19 even though it only launched in 2008.

To put it bluntly: Firefox has benefited from the rapid-release cycle. Both fixes and features get out to users faster than before, which puts a safer, sleeker browser in your hands with fewer delays. A vocal, minuscule minority has pooh-poohed the increase in version numbers, but that's hardly a legitimate complaint in a world where mobile apps update silently and effectively.

These major changes first landed in Firefox 4, released in March 2011, so we're going to be referencing it a fair bit. The browser that you can download now is in the same speed category as its competition; offers many similar features (stronger in some areas and slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support for hardware acceleration and other "future-Web" tech and standards; and is a must-have for Android users (download for Android).

Firefox 13 makes a series of visual and performance tweaks that many people will notice instantly. There's a new New Tab page that emulates the frequently visited sites New Tab pages that the competition has had for some time. There's a redesigned default Home page at about:home that offers large icons to give you easy access to downloads, bookmarks, history, add-ons, sync, and settings.

On the performance side, Firefox 13 now has Google's SPDY protocol on by default. That means that Web sites that support it, such as Google.com and Twitter.com, will load faster and safer. SPDY is safer because it forces SSL encryption for all connections.

If you're a tab addict, restarting Firefox will now only load the active tab. Other tabs will be visible and accessible, but they won't load their content until you click on them. Hands-down, Mozilla has mastered the art of the 100-tab browser.

It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox available at the moment, and this review only addresses the stable branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels -- Firefox beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for Windows | Mac | Linux); and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly Firefox Minefield (download for all versions) -- are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.