Mozilla releases Firefox 18

Firefox 18 is already out now and has been made available on its FTP servers since last night.

Firefox 18 is the first new release for 2013 and was originally going to be released on 1 January 2013, but it was delayed by at least a week to avoid conflicts with major holidays, including Christmas Day and New Years Day.

Firefox 18 is based on the Gecko 18 engine featuring numerous improvements over its predecessor, Firefox 17. The log changes in Firefox 18 were originally published on 22 November 2012. The browser has been released in over 70 languages with 10 additional test languages.

In this release, Firefox 18 features IonMonkey, Mozilla's next generation JavaScript JIT compiler, which aims to enable many new optimisations that were impossible with earlier architectures.

Another new feature is preliminary Web Real-Time Communication support or WebRTC, an API that is being drafted by the World Wide Web Consortium to enable browser to browser applications for voice calling, video chat and peer-to-peer file sharing without the use of plugins.

Lastly comes exclusive support for the Retina display on Mac OS 10.7 and Mac OS 10.8. This comes more than five months after Google's Chrome browser gained support for Apple's high-resolution Mac screens.

As for the Extended Support Releases, Firefox 17.0.2 ESR and Firefox 10.0.12 ESR have been released. Unfortunately, barring any major security and stability issues that will arise over the next six weeks, this will be the last planned security update for Firefox 10 ESR. Firefox 10 ESR will reach end of life on 19 February 2013.

Now with that said, here are a complete list of changes in Firefox 18:

WHAT'S NEW IN FIREFOX 18

(NEW) Faster JavaScript performance via IonMonkey compiler.
(NEW) Retina display support for Mac OS X 10.7 and up.
(NEW) Preliminary WebRTC support.
(CHANGED) Experience better image quality with the new HTML scaling algorithm.
(CHANGED) Performance improvements around tab switching.
(DEVELOPER) windows.devicePixelRatio DOM property support has been added.
(DEVELOPER) Improvements were made in startup time through smart handling of signed extension certificates.
(HTML5) W3C touch events support implemented, taking the place of MozTouch events.
(FIXED) Disabled insecure content loading on HTTPS pages.
(FIXED) Improved responsiveness for users on proxies.
(UNRESOLVED) Certain valid WebGL drawing operations are incorrectly rejected, leaving incomplete rendering in affected pages.
(UNRESOLVED) If you try to start Firefox using a locked profile, the browser will crash.
(UNRESOLVED) For some users, scrolling in the main GMail window will be slower than usual.
(UNRESOLVED) In Microsoft Windows XP and up, the use of Microsoft's System Restore functionality shortly after updating Firefox may prevent future updates.
(UNRESOLVED) In Firefox 18, starting the browser with -private flag incorrectly claims you are not in Private Browsing mode. This issue will be resolved in Firefox 19.
(UNRESOLVED) Plugins stop rendering when the top half of the plugin is scrolled off the top of the page, in HiDPI mode.

For a complete list of changes for Firefox 18, read the bug list: www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…

WHAT'S FIXED IN FIREFOX 17.0.2 ESR

Security fixes in this update were released.
Multiple stability improvements since the first planned security update seven weeks ago.
Improvements to the Click-to-Play vulnerable plugin blocklisting feature.


WHAT'S FIXED IN FIREFOX 10.0.12 ESR

Only security fixes in this update were released. Barring any security and stability issues that may arise in the next six weeks, this is the last planned security update for Firefox 10 ESR.

In order to install Firefox 18, your computer must meet or exceed the following system requirements:

A Pentium 4 or newer processor with SSE2 instructions or better.
Windows XP SP21, Mac OS 10.6 or better
512 MB of system memory2
200 MB of hard disk space

_{¹ While 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and up can be used to run Firefox, only 32-bit official builds of the browser are supported at this time.
² Firefox may run on slower computers with less memory, but it will be less usable.}

Download Firefox 18 now: releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozil…

Now that Firefox 18 is out, support for the regular release of Firefox 17 has come to a end, however Firefox 17 ESR will continue to be supported through security and stability fixes until 10 December 2013. Also, for organisations who are still on Windows 2000, Windows XP RTM, Windows XP SP1 or Mac OS X 10.5, Firefox 10.0.12 ESR has been released. The update was made available on 3 January 2013.

Again, barring any security and stability issues that may arise over the next weeks, this is the last planned update for Firefox 10 ESR. Users who are on Firefox 10 ESR after 19 February 2013 will have to make a hard transition to Firefox 17 ESR as Firefox 10 ESR will reach end-of-life.

And now that Firefox 18 has been released, Firefox 19 will migrate to the Beta channels later this week, Firefox 20 will migrate to the Aurora channels soon and Firefox 21 will make its first appearance in the Nightly channels.

The first public beta release of Firefox 19 will be out later this week and the final version to the successor to Firefox 18 will be released on 19 February 2013.