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Mozilla previews new, cleaner Firefox for Android UI on Nightly build
Before you know it, you'll be enjoying a cleaner, shinier Firefox UI on Android -- but not before Mozilla gets the more adventurous to test it out. The brand-spanking new interface merges the Start Page and the Awesomescreen, which is what you see after tapping on the URL bar. Thus, it will house your history, bookmarks, reading list and most visited websites in one place. While Mozilla UI engineer Lucas Rocha calls it the "biggest UI change in Firefox for Android" since the app was released, the update isn't quite yet ready. If you're unafraid of testing unstable releases, however, you can take the new UI for a spin via Firefox Nightly -- Mozilla's launchpad for new features. Everyone else, feel free to head past the break for a comparison image of the current and future interfaces.
Firefox Nightly now packing OdinMonkey JavaScript optimization
Today, Firefox's Nightly channel received a pick me up in the form of its asm.js optimizer known as OdinMonkey. Baked into June's stable release of Firefox 22, this subset of Mozilla's rendering engine lets developers compile C or C++ to JavaScript by using Emscripten. This gives the code the potential to run within 2x its native performance. For those of you who've now gone cross-eyed, simply put this should give Firefox a hefty performance boost and open the door to more sophisticated browser-based games as well as faster web apps. For its inaugural offering, OdinMonkey is only available to Windows and Linux users, but the company says that OSX and ARM version are near completion.
Mozilla tests out opt-in system for plug-ins in latest Firefox nightly build
Plug-ins bogging down your web browsing? Then it looks like you could soon have another option to cut through the clutter right in Firefox. The latest nightly build of the browser includes a new feature that lets users turn off all plug-ins by default and then click on each to enable them (something that, we should note, can already be done through third-party add-ons). While that functionality is still in the early stages, Mozilla's Jared Wein says that they're now working on adding the ability to remember plug-in settings on a per-site basis, and hope to have the feature ready for the release version of Firefox 14 (currently due out in July). In the meantime, you can get an early look at the feature in the latest nightly build available at the source link below.
