The important things for developers in a rush…
Enable JavaScript as a preference setting checkbox is gone. The logic behind this, according to the bug report is “If a user unchecks this box, they’ll effectively render the browser unusable on a large number of sites. We should not ship this option to hundreds of millions of users”. It doesn’t lock JavaScript on though; you can still switch it with about:config, NoScript or similar. There’s just no easy way to turn it off now. Expect a Firefox Add-on in 5-4-3… By the way, if it was set to off, it’ll have been turned back on with FF23.
about:memory has been reduced down to a simple UI. Background on that change comes from Mozilla MemShrinker Nicholas Nethercote. In short, it’s a better UI for memory metric measurement and isn’t infested with UI side effects.
Mixed content is now blocked. So if you made a site which mixed HTTP and HTTPS content on pages, the insecure content (the HTTP stuff) will be blocked. And if you relied on it, your page will break. Mozilla’s details on the changes also include a link to the master bug for sites that break under this new set up.
Developer Tools in Firefox now include a shiny new Network Monitor; a posting from back in May covers that and the other additions (Remote style editor, Options panel to turn tools on and off, source map support for the debugger and more).
Oh, yes, the tag and the text-decoration: blink have been purged from the system. The bad smell that is the tag persists and doesn’t seem to have a “remove this” bug entry for it yet. Still, no more pretty much everywhere now.
And if you needed more reasons to update, Firefox 23 fixes 4 critical and 7 high severity bugs. Details of those, as usual, on the Security Advisories for Firefox page. As usual, autoupdating within Mozilla should get you there. Otherwise, you’ll find all versions here and release-notes here.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog