Firefox is a common search engine used by many, and commonly viewed as a safer way to search.  Firefox holds around 20% of the global search market and is hoping to capture more.  They have recently released the new and improved Firefox 16.  While it does have some bugs, most new releases do, they have improved its overall features and most people seem to be pleased with how well it functions.  Web developers will like that certain features have been added and regular web surfers will benefit from the changes as well.

Here is what’s new with Firefox 16:

• Default VoiceOver support on Mac OS X,  
• Initial Web app support for Windows, Mac and Linux
• The back button now works on websites that quickly redirect.
• Cleaned up staticLevel and UpvarCookie handling
• Volume control in video files is fixed
• Use-after-free in the IME State Manager 
• Heap memory corruption issues found using Address Sanitizer
• Use-after-free, buffer overflow, and out of bounds read issues found using Address Sanitizer
• Spoofing and script injection through location.hash
• Chrome Object Wrapper (COW) does not disallow acces to privileged functions or properties 
• Object and location property accessible by plugins GetProperty function can bypass security checks
• Crash with invalid cast when using instanceof operator 
• DOS and crash with full screen and history navigation
• Reader mode page have chrome privileges
• Some DOMWindowUtils methods bypass security checks 
• Continued access to initial origin after setting document.domain 
• select element persistance allows for attacks

There were specific changes that make Firefox 16 better for developers including:

• The <meter> element is now supported.
• Support for the HTML Microdata API has been added. (bug 591467)
• <canvas> now supports the CSS currentColor in all case. (bug 629882)

• <input> now allows filtering based on arbitrary mimetypes in accept.  (bug 565274)
• Some DOMWindowUtils methods bypass security checks Continued access to initial origin after setting document.domain select element persistance allows for attacks

• Support for the standard, unprefixed version of CSS Animations has been landed. (bug 762302)
• Support for reverse animation direction (keywords reverse and alternate-reverse on the animation-direction property) has been added. (bug 655920)
• You can now animate the CSS height and width properties.
• The animation-duration and transition-duration CSS properties now reject negative values (and do not handle them as 0s anymore) (bug 773102)
• Support for the standard, unprefixed version of CSS Transforms has been landed. (bug 745523)
• Support for the standard, unprefixed version of CSS Gradients has been landed. Note that the syntax has changed significantly since the prefixed version, so you should read up on this. (bug 752187)
• The -moz-box-sizing implementation has been updated to apply to table cells too. (bug 338554)