The latest installment of Firefox has been released and it’s full of some thoughtful features. Click-to-play blocklisting will help stop those annoying ad videos; ya know… the ones that obnoxiously start playing without any interaction. Mozilla reported 20 performance improvements in Firefox 17. But the one feature getting the most attention? Facebook Chat API. Log in and access your complete Friends list without missing a beat. No bugs reported just yet. Hit the jump for the full list of new features.
The main thrust of Mozilla’s trumpeting of Firefox 17, however, was what it called “Social API,” an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to bake connections to social media services into the browser.
The first result of the API, Facebook Messenger for Firefox, displays a sidebar that shows Facebook chat sessions and updates, including new comments, without requiring the user to steer to Facebook’s website. Additional tools range from message notifications to friend requests, accessible through new icons in the browser’s toolbar. Firefox 17 users can enable Messenger at this Facebook page, and the social networking giant has posted a short FAQ on the integration with Firefox.
