Mozilla Debuts Extended Support Release for Businesses with Firefox 10 Rollout

Mozilla (News - Alert) rolls out Firefox 10 today with what the company is calling “Extended Support Release for Businesses.” The program has been developed in conjunction with Mozilla’s Enterprise User Working Group.

Company officials said they created ESR in response to enterprise concerns about Mozilla’s new six-week update schedule for Firefox. Also, Mozilla plans to roll out new versions of its browser every six weeks to get updates into user hands as quickly as possible. ESR contains a full year of security updates, but a full update of the browser will only occur every seven update cycles, or every 42 weeks.

Many enterprises felt that the fast release cycle did not give them time to fully train employees to use the new browser version before a newer update came onto the market. They also expressed concerns about the application certification burden posed by constant new rollouts.

Firefox 10 also contains updates for developers. Previous versions have included a tool for inspecting the Document Object Model, a JavaScript scratchpad and a web console.

In addition, there is a new tightly integrated developer panel with improved DOM inspection capabilities.

Another improvement includes the addition of a full-screen API, which allows individual HTML elements to break out of the browser window and to stretch themselves across the entire screen. The feature will greatly enhance both videos and games, and Mozilla considered abuse scenarios carefully before deploying the feature. Only direct user action can switch the browser to full-screen mode, and Mozilla assures this by using a technique similar to what is used to block pop-up windows.

Firefox 10 supports 3D CSS transforms. Originally developed by Apple (News - Alert), 3D CSS transforms apply animated 3D transformation to individual HTML elements on a page. The technique was already being used in developer circles, but most of the material was written using Webkit-specific prefixes.

The rollout also includes a tool for viewing, toggling and modifying CSS (News - Alert) properties. The CSS inspector will show a list of properties associated with webpage elements. Each property can be checked off to toggle visibility, and developers can also click a property to replace it on the fly.

While the new developments for Firefox 10 are slim, experts consider them acceptable with the browser’s fast rollout schedule. Many new updates are anticipated in future versions, including a tool utilizing WebGL to show users 3D representations of a page’s DOM.