Today, Firefox version 29, codename Australis was released for Ubuntu Trusty Tahr. If you are running Ubuntu, you should have been given notification through the Updater to install this. I did, and what I liked what I saw. Here is a quick screenshot tour and review.

For one thing, I stopped using Firefox as my main browser quite long back, mainly due to the resource usage and the heavy feeling, especially considering I spend 60% of my work time in a web browser. Having said that, I think I’ll give Firefox 28 and above a spin.

So, here is what I found from my quick play around and I hope it will help you if want to take a sneak peak before deciding to actually start using it.

First, the screenshot tour for the impatient 🙂

What I liked:

• Despite the fact that it looks more like Chrome/Chromium, I did like the fluid shape of the tab. But here is where Firefox aces: The inactive tabs are nicely pushed out of focus with intelligent demarcation color scheme for multiple inactive tabs.
• Customization tool which is more intuitive and user friendly
• Consistent and better rendering of fonts. For some reason, Chromium and most probably Chrome the font in address bar has gone haywire for the last few releases.
• Better memory and CPU utilization: I had 48 tabs running at once, some of which were heavy apps (Flash, interactive JS etc.,). No matter what I threw at it, Firefox took it and made easy job of it.
• Though not new, integrated download notification.
• Faster page loading than before. This is purely from a User Experience point of view. YMMV. I really don’t believe in a zillion benchmark tests to qualify a browser usable for me 🙂

What I didn’t like:

• Maybe someone filed a bug already: when I tried installing a downloaded extension (Google Analytics opt-out), Firefox weirdly opened another minute window and asked for the permission to install it.
• Sync: when using Chromium, I had a nice ecosystem of integrating the sync system to my gmail account. As someone who tends to frown at having to maintain a bunch of credentials, it worked nice for me. Now I have to remember YET another credential set.

NOTE: Please note that the points mentioned above (both like and dislikes) are a result of around 30 minutes play around. I’ll update this article OR write another one with more observations.

VERDICT:

Compared to earlier releases, I believe Mozilla has done an excellent job of churning out a faster, better looking and resource optimized browser. I think I’ll use it for sometime.

So, did you try the new Firefox? Did you like it? Love to hear your thoughts. Just leave a comment below!! You also may want to subscribe so you get to know what is happening in theotherinformation.com