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Softpedia Editor's Review for Firefox
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The browser provides virus, popup and spyware protection in a simple, easy to use tabbed interface
Written by Bogdan Popa on August 22nd, 2012
Mozilla Firefox is an open source web browser with a clean design, providing excellent browsing speed and very powerful customization tools, with just a reasonable footprint on computer resources.
Firefox bundles features that include smart bookmarks, spell check, private browsing, a download manager, incremental find, tab grouping (gathers related tabs and organizes them into groups) and several others. In addition to these, Firefox also accommodates a series of tools for developers, such as the DOM Inspector and the Error Console.
The first contact with Firefox shouldn't be surprising since most browsers have already adopted tabbed browsing. It comes with a tabbed interface so opening multiple pages at the same time isn't a problem anymore. But what's under the hood is what really makes the difference.
Firefox is amazingly fast and blocks pop-ups, some viruses and spyware, but also gives the user an extraordinary power of customization through a well-developed add-on manager. Basically, you can change almost everything in your browser, starting with the way it looks and ending with features and functionality.
Mozilla lets you install new themes and so-called Personas that change the appearance of the main window, as well as add-ons (created by third-party developers) for adding new functions to the application.
Firefox Sync is another feature worth mentioning; it enables you to synchronize browser bookmarks, passwords, forms and add-ons across multiple computers, by storing all of these on the dedicated Mozilla servers. The data is encrypted, so no other person, aside from you, is granted access to it.
Firefox is fast and reliable and includes a decent set of customization tools. With the aid of a few add-ons and themes, it can be tailored to the needs of day-to-day users, as well as developers.  Read an in-depth analysis in our professional review for Firefox
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Firefox description
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Here are some key features of "Firefox":
· Comprehensive popup controls to keep unwanted advertising off your desktop;
· A tab browsing mode that lets you open several pages in a single window, allowing you to load links in the background without leaving the page you're on;
· Integrated search (powered by Google);
· Industry leading accessibility with Find As You Type - find links and page text by simply typing;
· Simplified privacy controls that let you cover your tracks more effectively;
· A streamlined browser window that lets you see more of the page than any other browser while at the same time being more configurable;
· A large variety of free downloadable extensions and themes that add specific functionality and visual changes to the browser.
Requirements:
· Pentium 4 or newer processor that supports SSE2
· 512MB of RAM
· 200MB of hard drive space
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
New:
· Windows: Firefox now follows display scaling options to render text larger on high-res displays
· WebRTC is now enabled by default!
· HTML5 audio/video playback rate can now be Changed
· Social services management implemented in Add-ons Manager
· asm.js optimizations (OdinMonkey) enabled for major performance improvements
Changed:
· Improved WebGL rendering performance through asynchronous canvas updates
· Plain text files displayed within Firefox will now word-wrap
· For user security, the |Components| object is no longer accessible from web content
· Improved memory usage and display time when rendering images
· Pointer Lock API can now be used outside of fullscreen
Developer:
· CSS3 Flexbox implemented and enabled by default
· New Web Notifications API implemented
· Added clipboardData API for JavaScript access to a user's clipboard
· New built-in font inspector
HTML5:
· New HTML5 and elements
Fixed:
· Scrolling using some high-resolution-scroll aware touchpads feels slow
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