It’s been about a year since Mozilla shipped Firefox 4 and outlined its intentions to move toward faster and more frequent releases of Firefox. They’ve sure delivered upon that, yesterday releasing Firefox 11 with a handful of notable new features for both consumers and developers.
For users, the big new feature is add-on sync. It effectively allows users the option to keep their add-ons in sync across computers. This is an opt-in feature that is available in the Sync tab of the Preferences window. Meanwhile developers can utilise a new ‘Page Inspector 3D View’ that literally turns a website into a 3D model that highlights how the particular webpage elements are constructed on top of each other.
While developer tools like “view source” have always been useful to learn about how to develop a page, the 3D View more clearly illustrates how the parts of a website are structured. After selecting “3D” View in Page Inspector, just hover your mouse over the elements to get more information about each piece you select.
Firefox 11 also features a ‘Style Editor’, allowing developers to edit CSS stylesheets and view their changes take effect instantly and live - all “entirely within the browser”. It’s sure to make it easy for developers to iterate quickly and efficiently. Once done developers can save the updated stylesheet to their computer.
Jump the break for a short video that demoes the new Page Inspector 3D view. You can download Firefox 11 here.
[via Firefox Blog]