Firefox 10 hits desktops, phones and tablets

Mozilla has released Firefox 10 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, including a series of built-in tools to help developers tweak their websites in real time.

Firefox for Android has a new look, resembling a native Android app. Image credit: Mozilla

The latest major version of Mozilla's browser came out for desktops, tablets and smartphones on Tuesday. Firefox 10 brings with it some slight user interface changes, such as the hiding of the 'forward' button until the user navigates back. Most add-ons for the browser should also from now on be compatible with new versions of Firefox by default.

Some of the changes are in Firefox's implementation of HTML5, particularly the addition of new application programming interfaces (APIs) that let developers write full-screen web apps. This feature is particularly intended for games, videos and presentations.

Firefox 10 also fixes some major bugs, such as the crashes that some users were experiencing when moving bookmarks. Another fixed bug sometimes caused the Mac OS X version of Firefox to crash due to a conflict with Apple's latest Java release.

The biggest changes in Firefox 10 are arguably on the developer side, as Mozilla has used the release to build in new developer tools such as Page Inspector.

"With Page Inspector, developers can peek into a page's structure and layout without having to leave Firefox. This means they can quickly navigate between page elements and view the HTML document structure for the page," a Mozilla blog post on Tuesday read.

A feature called the Style Inspector gives developers a quick way to inspect CSS properties and view or change values within the browser. The Scratchpad JavaScript editor in Firefox has also been upgraded to use the Eclipse Orion code editor for syntax highlighting and other actions.

Under the hood, Mozilla has also introduced anti-aliasing for the WebGL hardware-accelerated 3D graphics standard, along with CSS 3D Transforms so 2D elements can be converted into three dimensions without the need for third-party plug-ins.

While the Android version of Firefox 10 benefits from most of the browser's new features, it still lacks a Flash plug-in, slightly limiting its utility on Android smartphones and tablets.