Firefox 12 available for download now

Mozilla’s rapid release cycle has been on, in full speed and there have been new releaes coming out one after another. Firefox, one of the most popular web browsers around is very near to its next big release - version 12. The official date for release is the 24th of April, which is tomorrow, but as always, the final release binaries are already out on the Mozilla server. The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You can download the English version of Firefox 12 here. Other releases can be found here.

The new release doesn’t add a whole lot more to the browser, instead there a few changes and a bunch of bug fixes. A new feature is the ability for the download manager to automatically start downloading links that are added to it. OS X users will also notice some improvement in the WebGL performance. Other changes include improvements to the CSS. Programmers and designers will also find that the page source window now has line numbers, making it easy to find code. Users using Windows’ User Access Control will find the installation of the new browser to be a tad quicker. The next big release - Firefox 13 is expected to hit the web on the 5th of June, 2012. Firefox 13, which is currently part of the Aurora channel will move to the Beta channel once Firefox 12 is official out tomorrow. Firefox 11 came out in the middle of last month.

The slight drop in popularity has allowed Firefox’s main competition - Google’s Chrome browser - to catch up and even overtake it. Mozilla has been focussing on preparing Firefox for Windows 8’s Metro user interface and they hope to get back some of the lost market share from Chrome. Google also has been working on getting its browser ready for the big release of Windows 8 in October this year. Another area of focus for the Mozilla team has been the Android platform and they have a browser out for it. Users can check out the Beta version of the Firefox 12 browser for Android on the Google Play store.