I’ve been playing around with the Firefox 13 beta for a while now hoping for the day that the official Firefox 13 release would be upon us. While the actual release is tomorrow, you can grab an early version right now.
If you’ve been using the Firefox 13 beta for any time at all, most of the updates contained in Firefox 13 should be old news for you. For those of you who are still rocking Firefox 12, let me just say that Firefox 13 is definitely worth the upgrade.
After a string of pretty disappointing updates, Mozilla has finally nailed it with the 13th iteration of the browser. It contains a number of super helpful new features that make browsing faster and more convenient. A number of these updates have been a long time coming and it’s nice to see Firefox embracing the future.
The first you’re going to notice upon booting up Firefox 13 is that the home page has been changed. Besides just having the Google Search bar and the Firefox logo to keep you company, the home page now features easy access links to all the major components of Firefox including downloads, bookmarks, history, add-ons and so forth.
Taking a page from Chrome, the new tab page on Firefox 13 now has easy access to your nine most visited sites. It’s definitely one of the more requested features from Firefox and I’m glad to see Mozilla complying. It does nothing to set itself apart from the other browsers but just having it is good enough for most users.
As we mentioned before, one of the cooler features in Firefox 13 is Tabs on Demand. In essence, it allows users to choose which tabs should be opened upon start up to cut down on clutter and the abysmal speeds users experienced when opening Firefox with 30 tabs.
Another feature that you will notice is Reset Firefox. It’s an attempt on the part of Mozilla to cut down on the tedium of trying to fix Firefox when it breaks. With the reset function, you can open a new profile and migrate everything over in hopes of fixing any corruption that may have occurred.
All in all, Firefox 13 has some great features that users have long been requesting. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s taking the browser in the right direction. Mozilla most likely has some exciting plans in the pipeline for future versions of Firefox including the massive redesign that we’ll see sooner or later.
If you want to grab Firefox 13 now, you can do so from our friends at DownloadCrew. If you would rather download it from Mozilla themselves, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow when it officially goes out.