Update: Firefox 27 is available now for Windows, Mac and Android.
Mozilla’s Firefox 27 will be officially released today. It includes various improvements, but doesn’t radically change the browser. The upcoming major design overhaul ‘Australis’ is still in development channels.
Firefox 27’s main improvements are support for TLS 1.2 and a tweaked social API.
TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security) is a security protocol, the successor to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), so this means Firefox is up to date with the latest internet security.
The Social API began as a partnership with Facebook, to make it easy for the social network to integrate with Firefox. The first example of this in action was the Facebook Messenger for Firefox, but from version 27, it will be open to all developers who want to integrate social features into Firefox.
In Mozilla’s development ‘Nightly Builds’, which you can use if you want to check out the Firefox of the future and don’t mind too much about stability or bugs, a new Firefox Sync is being tested. Sync allows you to synchronize your history and so on in Firefox on different devices. The system currently implemented in Firefox is clunky and not very user friendly.
The new Sync is more like that found in Chrome – instead of long generated keys that you had to use to set up Firefox on each device, instead you’ll be able to sign in with a normal email/password combination.
