Aurora, the Firefox version that brought users the latest and greatest feature in a sometimes slightly unstable environment, has been replaced by Mozilla on the browser’s 10th anniversary with Firefox Developer Edition.
With the name change also comes a major improvement that will surely be appreciated by website developers. Mozilla included an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) right inside the browser, so Web developers can turn their face from Chrome yet again.
New elements are visible from the second you launch the browser. Unlike Aurora, which had a light theme that wasn’t that different from the one in the stable version, Firefox Developer Edition comes with a dark default theme to go along with the developer tools.
Secondly, Firefox Tools Adapter has become part of the browser, and is now known as ‘Valence’. Using this tool, you get to see how your website behaves when used with other rendering engines, which vary from Chrome to Safari and even Firefox OS.
Not at last, Mozilla has added WebIDE to Firefox Developer Edition, a set of tools that enables developers to create, evaluate and launch Web apps. There’s a focus on Firefox OS here, as well. Mozilla’s Dave Camp provided a short explanation on each of the tools in the following video.
Having used Aurora myself for a while (mainly because I like to be up-to-date with the latest technologies implemented in browsers), I was quite surprised to see the new theme after updating the program. There were also changes in the interface, hinting at the fact that new features had been added. Bear in mind that after updating from Aurora to Firefox Developer Edition all of your add-ons will be gone. At least that’s what happened to me, as I had to install them all over again.
Aurora was quite easy on the resources, but Firefox Developer Edition proved hungry for power on certain sites. RAM usage was still within decent limits (unlike Opera 12.17, which some people still use until the Norwegian company decides to implement some of the old features that made their browser famous), but CPU usage went as high as 48 percent sometimes. That will definitely vary from one computer to another, as I have quite the Antikythera mechanism, but it’s a thing to keep in mind. I’m sure that the performance of the browser will be drastically improved in future releases.
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