Firefox 10 gets developer-friendly with Inspector features

Firefox 10, the latest version of the Mozilla web browser, was released today and brought a bunch of developer tools with the new update. Non-developers get a few new features too: faster updates and better add-on compatibility.

Page Inspector, a new feature in this release, lets developers view a page’s layout and HTML structure. Firefox highlights the page area you want to inspect and display the HTML tag for the part of the page. Want to know the what font you are looking at? Use the Style Inspector to reveal CSS information for the page. Both Inspector features reveal how the page is structured and the rules used to create the page. You can even spend sometime playing around with the page, changing margins, font sizes, and more which is especially cool for those who’ve never worked with HTML or CSS before. Nothing is changed in the website’s real code, but developers can get a visual idea of how their pages will look.

Another new feature is Scratchpad, a code editor that highlights syntax for JavaScript developers. You can build and test code, all while looking at the webpage the code will be used on.

Firefox has also released the Mozilla Full-Screen API so developers can build full screen apps and games and deliver full screen video content. The latest release also includes support for 3D Web experience with WebGL, a standard for running 3D graphics.

For all the non-developer Firefox devotees, Mozilla touts that version 10 gives you a simpler update process and much better add-on compatibility. However, this writer didn’t notice much difference with how the update was applied.