Tuesday, September 27th 2011
Firefox in Warp Zone, Updated to Version 7.0
A little over a month after releasing Firefox 6.0, and quickly following it up with two minor updates (6.0.1 and 6.0.2), Mozilla released its next "major" version, Firefox 7.0 into the release channel. It is now clear that Mozilla Firefox is playing catch-up with other popular web-browsers in some sort of a version number game. The three year old Google Chrome is already into version 14, with version 16 already in the dev channel.
While Firefox users will not be in for a different user interface (it's bad to drastically change it from time to time), Firefox 7 does seem to come with several under-the-hood changes. To begin with, the Windows version features a brand-new rendering back-end that speeds up Canvas, a tweaked Sync system that instantly syncs changes to bookmarks and saved passwords, support for text-overflow: ellipsis, compliance with the Web Timing specification, WebSocket protocol updated from version 7 to 8, and improved support for MathML. The only UI change is that the protocol of the page loaded is hidden. The full URL will be copied when you copy the address in the bar. Firefox 7 is launched for all platforms it's available in: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 7
While Firefox users will not be in for a different user interface (it's bad to drastically change it from time to time), Firefox 7 does seem to come with several under-the-hood changes. To begin with, the Windows version features a brand-new rendering back-end that speeds up Canvas, a tweaked Sync system that instantly syncs changes to bookmarks and saved passwords, support for text-overflow: ellipsis, compliance with the Web Timing specification, WebSocket protocol updated from version 7 to 8, and improved support for MathML. The only UI change is that the protocol of the page loaded is hidden. The full URL will be copied when you copy the address in the bar. Firefox 7 is launched for all platforms it's available in: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
80 Comments on Firefox in Warp Zone, Updated to Version 7.0
if you want to read about PROPER "versioning" then look no further than apache.
apr.apache.org/versioning.html
Seriously, because according to the OP it basically is only an update in its engine with the exception of the improved Sync feature. That's why I think it's ridiculous to name it like a major update instead of 6.x or 6.0.x .However it is very different to Windows 7 in all the aspects, performance, GUI, resource consumption, new major features like Metro, HyperV, better anti malware software... I believe Microsoft does the opposite of what Firefox and Chrome are doing: make major versions like minor ones in their versioning system of Windows (if it doesn't refer the kernel, of course).
In fact, Vista SP2 runs every bit as good as 7 in most things as well.
I was wondering why my MSI-AB was ramping up my GPU's fanspeed, only to see higher temperatures from Firefox intermittently taking the GPU usage to over 50%, more than even "The Witcher", which only uses ~35% at max gfx!!
Anyway you can disable hardware acceleration.
Yeah it's very high and the GPU heats considerably, but at least it's way faster and more efficient than CPU rendering (at least here) without hardware rendering the scrolling becomes very choppy and pages with many images or complex becomes very slow, CPU intensive(this happens me with Chrome, while in Firefox with HW rendering, it is smooth (even with a HD5450 :lol: )
The only situation Opera is slower than Firefox here is in pages with many images for example the game Screenshot thread here.