Mozilla Firefox is one of the World's most popular web browsers and was one of the first to break the stranglehold of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) on the web browsing market.
With good reason too. Firefox remains an incredibly powerful and customizable browser although persistent memory leakage problems and competition from Google Chrome have dented its popularity.
Mozilla Firefox 12, though not very different from Firefox 11 in terms of design, brings a bunch of subtle improvements. There are several changes in Firefox 12, but mainly related to developer features. Mozilla claim there are 85 changes in all but the most notable is that Windows users will no longer get pestered by a User Account Control pop-up every time the browser updates. Also, the HTML5 media controls have been updated to provide a full screen button.
The developer console changes include improvement to Web Console, Style Editor, Page Inspector, Style Inspector, and HTML View, as well as the recently introduced Scratchpad and Page Inspector 3D View.
The interface is pretty much the same as Firefox 11, with a minimalist toolbar and there's still no way of removing elements that you may not want such as Java and .Net Framework. The major downside for most users however is that some plug-ins or add-ons won't work with Firefox 12 yet - so if you have a lot installed, prepare to be disappointed.
One major problem that persists is the high usage of RAM when Firefox is displaying Flash videos such as YouTube. Firefox runs an extra "Plugin-container" process for Flash videos that can occasionally consume 100% of your CPU and cause your machine to freeze.
Firefox 12 isn't a revolution in the development of Firefox, but there are some useful improvements that still make it one of the best browsers out there.
