Firefox 24 brings WebRTC, NFC support for Android, quick tab closing for desktop

Mozilla has released Firefox 24 for desktop and Android with special attention given to the mobile version of the release. The desktop update is out for Windows, Mac and Linux along with Android and brings important changes like an option to close tabs and interestingly WebRTC support as well as NFC sharing to the mobile version of the service.

As far as the desktop goes, Firefox 24 gives you the option to “close tabs to the right”, a handy tool if you want to clear your browser window of clutter. However, as PC Mag notes, the button is located right above the “reopen closed tab” option, which once selected will end up messing your browser up further.

Sharing gets better

Highlighting social features seems to be the way to go for Firefox as with this release you will be able to move chat windows by dragging them around. There’s now support for a new scrollbar style in Mac OS X 10.7 and newer. There’s also a bunch of changes with Firefox 24, including removal of support for Revocation Lists feauture, accessibility related improvements with relation to using pinned tabs and performance improvements on New Tab page loads. Needless to say there are quite a few under-the-hood changes to go with the release too.

If you thought there were quite a few changes for the desktop version of Firefox, think again. Mozilla has energised the Android version of Firefox 24 and how! Importantly, the browser has support enabled for WebRTC by default now.

New Night mode for better reading

Firefox now supports mozGetUserMedia, mozRTCPeerConnection and DataChannels. Essentially, developers can capture camera and microphone streams directly from the app using JavaScript, says The Next Web. Users will be able to make browser-to-browser calls, share data and enable peer-to-peer apps using Firefox for Android.

The application now has NFC-enabled sharing through bumping of devices now. So, if a friend of yours is using Firefox for Android on his NFC-enabled phone too, you can bump your devices to share data.  Talking about sharing, you can now also quickshare websites and articles from Firefox for Android. The app will add your most frequent sharing service to the menu bar too. So if you share on Facebook more often, you’ll find a button there.

If you use Firefox to do some reading, there’s now a Night mode functionality in reader that will make it easy for you to read. Also, if you’re in China, Baidu will be the default search engine for you now.

While the desktop update is already available, Firefox for Android is getting an update rolling out via Google Play slowly.