Following the recent support of WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) in Chrome, Mozilla has also updated Firefox with WebRTC support.
The technology works like Skype but without any plugin. "Plugins are the single largest source of security and stability issues that we see," said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's vice-president of engineering for Firefox. WebRTC lets you conduct voice and video calling one browser to another via its PeerConnection component, but it also lets you transfer data directly between two browsers thanks to a component called DataChannels.
Firefox 22 also enables ASM.js, a Mozilla invention to improve the speed of JavaScript to the point where it almost loads as fast as native code.
Complete Changelog:
- NEW Windows: Firefox now follows display scaling options to render text larger on high-res displays
- NEW WebRTC is now enabled by default!
- NEW Mac OS X: Download progress in Dock application icon
- NEW HTML5 audio/video playback rate can now be changed
- NEW Social services management implemented in Add-ons Manager
- NEW asm.js optimizations (OdinMonkey) enabled for major performance improvements
- CHANGED Improved WebGL rendering performance through asynchronous canvas updates
- CHANGED Plain text files displayed within Firefox will now word-wrap
- CHANGED For user security, the |Components| object is no longer accessible from web content
- CHANGED Improved memory usage and display time when rendering images
- CHANGED Pointer Lock API can now be used outside of fullscreen
- DEVELOPER CSS3 Flexbox implemented and enabled by default
- DEVELOPER New Web Notifications API implemented
- DEVELOPER Added clipboardData API for JavaScript access to a user's clipboard
- DEVELOPER New built-in font inspector
- HTML5 New HTML5 <data> and <time> elements
- FIXED Scrolling using some high-resolution-scroll aware touchpads feels slow (829952)