Mozilla today launched Firefox 27. The new version of the browser features a major update to the Firefox Social API, which now includes support for the old-school Web 2.0 social bookmarking tool Delicious and the Indian music service Saavn. More importantly, though, the Social API now allows users to run more than one service at a time.
Firefox’s Social API is meant to provide social networking services, chat tool and news sites with a persistent spot in the browser to pop up notifications. It launched in 2012 and Mozilla opened it up to developers last year, though I never got the impression that companies were racing to launch their Social API integrations.
One of the main issues with the service, though, was that you could only run one integration at a time and had to somewhat awkwardly switch between them if you insisted on using more than one. Now that this limitation has been lifted, we may just see a few more integrations go live.
The only other major new features to launch in this version are support for Google’s SPDY 3.1 protocol and the addition of Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions 1.1 and 1.2. to Firefox’s networking arsenal. These are essentially the successors of the well-known SSL cryptographic protocol.
On Android, the Firefox team only made a couple of changes this time around. The mobile version now also features TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support, as well as a more readable default font and a few minor user interface improvements.
