on June 5. The company issues a new version every six weeks under the rapid-release schedule it adopted last year.

That schedule was criticized earlier this month by Jono Xia, a five-year veteran of the firm. in general, and those by Mozilla specifically, in a blog post that attracted widespread attention.

Xia's contention was that updates are major disruptions, and that developers do not properly weigh users' concerns about dealing with constantly-changing software.

Feature changes to Firefox 14 included support for OS X Lion's full-screen mode, work that started in March 2011; so-called "click-to-play" plug-ins that require the user to authorize any plug-in execution by clicking on a page component; and a by-default secure connection between the browser and Google's search site.

The latter, said Mozilla, encrypts the data sent to google.com to keep it from being spied on by "prying eyes, like network administrators when you use public or shared WiFi networks."