Firefox 10 Releases Today, Fixes Add-On Compatibility Issues

Firefox 10 is due to release today, continuing Mozilla's commitment to the six-week release cycle it switched to last year. As usual with these rapid-release browsers, Firefox 10 brings a couple of features you'll probably notice and a few more that you probably won't. The browser is available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, Intel versions of Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7, and most flavors of Linux.

Firefox 10's banner feature is a tweak designed to fix add-on compatibility - most add-ons compatible with Firefox version 4 and later will now automatically be marked as compatible by the browser without any additional updates from the add-on's developer. This is true both of add-ons downloaded from Mozilla's repository, or add-ons installed from elsewhere on the Internet. This was done to ease the pain of upgrading for heavy add-on users, and to make way for Mozilla's silent Firefox updater, which is tentatively scheduled to land in June with the release of Firefox 13.

Mozilla has also hidden the browser's forward button unless it can actually be used, implemented anti-aliasing for WebGL, added support for CSS3 3D transforms, added full-screen APIs to allow for full-screen web apps (though still no official support for Lion's Full Screen mode), and a few other small feature and bug changes.

FF10 is also the first release of the browser to be offered as an "Extended Support Release" or ESR, which will be offered as a separate download - as we reported earlier this month, the ESRs will be good for a year, and will keep the same major version number and rendering engine while being kept current with security and bug fixes. The ESR is intended to replace Firefox 3.6, which has been patched continuously as Firefoxes 4 through 9 have been end-of-lifed, and is meant to placate enterprise administrators and others upset by the new rapid release cycle. Firefox 3.6 is tentatively scheduled to be discontinued on April 24, so if you've stuck by it for the last year you should begin testing the new version soon.

Source: Mozilla

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Bitfenix USB 3.0 connectors pass GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing

Modern motherboards can have up to 2 onboard USB 3.0 headers, but not every mobo ships with front USB 3.0 connector cables. What do you do if your case doesn’t support enough front panel USB 3.0 connectors?

I’m facing this problem at the moment with my newest PC build where my new case only has 1 onboard header for USB 3.0 (for 2 front USB 3.0 ports). This means that the other 2 front USB 3.0 ports are wasted! What’s more is that my PC sits snugly under my desk in my cubicle at work, so it is not practical for me to always get on my hands and knees to access the USB 3.0 ports in the back I/O panel, so I want to have the maximum number of convenient front panel USB ports.

Bitfenix just sent us two solutions to this problem in the form of the BFA-U3-KU3IU3-RP Internal USB 3.0 Adapter and the BFA-U3-K435-RP USB 3.0 Front Panel. They both just passed GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing and we have added them to our USB 3.0 microsite. Here they are (they are hyperlinked so just click on them to have a look at the Bitfenix product web page):

 

I especially like the front panel connector because it has 4 USB 3.0 ports with a decent distance between them so that you can use multiple bulky USB devices at the same time.

Check out our USB 3.0 microsite for more USB 3.0 devices that have passed GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing.

A Chinese version of this blog article can be found here.