Another new version of Firefox was made available yesterday. Along with the usual crop of security bug fixes, version 23 sports a few changes worthy of mention:

• A shiny new logo.
• A Network panel was added to the Web Developer Tools. This panel shows the network activity associated with web browsing, including load times.
• The HTML text ‘blink’ attribute has been removed. Blinking text has fallen out of fashion, and it’s generally seen as not user-friendly and non-accessible.
• The ‘Disable Javascript’ setting has been removed from the Options dialog. The developers feel that since disabling Javascript causes many web sites to fail, the option should be hidden. The Javascript options are still accessible via about:config.
• The ‘Load images automatically’ setting was removed from the Options dialog. Again, the developers decided that this option was too dangerous for most users. You can still find the setting in about:config.
• The ‘Always show the tab bar’ setting was removed from the Options dialog. Like the other removed settings, somehow this option was felt to be too dangerous for most users. You can still find the setting in about:config.

Firefox version announcements still lacking

Update 2016Jan06: The release notes page for Firefox 23.0 no longer exists. It was moved to an archive site by Mozilla, but must have been lost in the process. There’s a broken link to the missing page on the Releases/Old/2013 page.

As always, there was no proper announcement for this release. I discovered the new version when I was reading Hacker News. I’ve outlined the problems with Firefox’s online resources in several previous posts, so I’ll just provide a brief list here. Suffice to say that nothing has improved since Firefox 22.

• According to Mozilla, the Mozilla Blog is where new versions of Firefox are announced. The blog has an RSS feed, which is good, and whenever a new version of Firefox becomes available, there is usually at least one post on the blog that describes some of the new version’s features. But these posts do not qualify as release announcements, because they never mention the new version number, or even that there is a new version! Here’s the ‘announcement’ for Firefox 23: Firefox Makes it Easy to Share Your Favorite Content with Friends & Family.
• The main release notes page has several problems, all of which would result in a failing grade in any ‘Web Pages 101’ course:
  • the page’s title makes no mention of the version;
  • the version isn’t mentioned in any of the page’s headings;
  • the first text on the page reads "Firefox Notes (First offered to release channel users on…", which makes it sound as though some ‘notes’ are being offered, not a specific version of Firefox;
  • the version is only visible in the page’s URL, which is barely human readable, and in an aside that thanks contributors.
• A link on the release notes page titled ‘complete list of changes‘ points to a list of bugs in Mozilla’s bug tracking system. The list is huge, and the information is highly technical and not really intended for regular users.
• The main download page never mentions the version, although all of the download links point to the most recent version.
• The hidden ‘security advisories‘ page lists Firefox security vulnerabilities by the date on which they were first reported by Mozilla, with no indication of which vulnerabilities have been fixed, or when they were fixed. This is somewhat mitigated by the also hidden ‘known vulnerabilities‘ page, which lists security vulnerabilities and the versions of Firefox in which they were fixed.