Firefox/Roadmap/Updates

2019-05-13

• Firefox 66.0.5 is our latest stable release. Oh dot five shipped last Tuesday to provide further improvements to re-enable web extensions which had been disabled for users with a master password set (Bug 1549249).
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and goes to the stable release on May 21st. That's a week out from what I told you all last week.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release users on July 9th. Over the last week there have been about 560 bugs resolved as fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • E10S can no longer be disabled with a user pref. There's still build-time config for disabling should developers need to manually test something.
  • WebRender has been enabled for Intel laptops with screen resolutions of 1900x1200 (WUXGA)and below.
  • Gecko now supports CSS -webkit-line-clamp for multi-line text elipses.
  • WebAuthn tokens are now supported on Android Firefox. This is behind the pref security.webauth.webauthn_enable_android_fido2 until tomorrow when it will be enabled by default. Tweet by J.C.
  • Dev Tools now shows an indicator on properties with inactive CSS.
  • The Add-ons discovery pane in Firefox now shows ratings and user counts.

2019-05-06

• On Friday evening we started receiving feedback that extensions were failing for Firefox users and the Firefox team quickly identified that we had a certificate chain issue. We are extremely sorry to all Firefox users affected by this issue. The TL;DR is that one of the certificates used to authenticate add-ons expired, causing the signatures on all add-ons to break. The fix was to deploy a new certificate to Firefox users. A fix was developed Friday night and initially pushed out to desktop Firefox users through the Normandy infrastructure on Saturday. The fix was rolled out in a full QA'd dot release to both Desktop and Android users on Sunday. There are still some outstanding issues actively being worked on and a list of those unresolved issues can be found in the Firefox 66.0.4 release notes. We will providing a full post mortem on the incident as soon as possible and for now you can also learn more about it at blog dot mozilla dot org slash addons.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release a week from tomorrow on May 14th.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on July 9th. Over the last week there have been approximately 475 bugs resolved as fixed. There was one notable change this week:
  • GetUserMedia now requires secure origins. This brings Firefox in line with Chrome and Safari. See the dev platform post for technical details.

2019-04-29

• Firefox 66.0.3 is our currently stable release and came out on April 10th.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on May 14th, two weeks from tomorrow. Beta 15 and 16 go out this week. These are our final betas.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to Stable on July 9th. 68 is the next ESR base. Next week we begin the Nightly soft code freeze. Last week saw about 500 bug fixes land on Nightly including these notable changes:
  • We've streamlined the "default browser" flow for Fennec and udpated the onboarding. As more users find their way to Fennec as a result of the Android browser choice screen in the EU, we want to make it easier to get started.
  • The new "discovery stream" has landed with a new New Tab layout. The layout moves the snippets up under the search box and includes 4 general interest Recommended by Pocket stories and then 4 stories for each of several categories.
  • Several picture in picture bugs were fixed including hiding the PiP button in fullscreen and hiding the PiP button except on hover.
  • When in "dark mode" Reader View's sidebar/toolbar and controls are now dark too.
  • The Accessibility color contrast auditor is considerably faster on pages with lots of text.
  • Gecko now has support for the Resize Observer API. This API can be used to detect when elements are resized, and run some javascript in response, all between layout & paint.
• From mozilla.dev.platform "Fennec will be following the 68 train to ESR68-based release. We want to provide users with a secure and supported legacy Firefox for Android until Fenix has matured enough for users to migrate to it. Therefore, starting from Gecko 68, we plan to use the ESR68 repository as a stable base for managing Fennec engineering, testing, and release of builds going forward."

2019-04-22

• Firefox 66.0.3 is our currently stable release.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on May 14th. Beta 13 and 14 go out this week. Our final betas go out next week.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to Stable on July 9th. Last week saw about 500 bug fixes land on Nightly including these notable changes:
  • An early version of picture in picture mode for video has been enabled. On hover, videos now have a small button labeled "Picture-In-Picture" and when clicked, the video pops out to an always-on-top video docked on the lower corner of the screen.
  • Firefox now pins its shortcut on the taskbar for Windows 10 users. Before we would put an icon on the Desktop and in the Start Menu. Now we also put an icon on the Taskbar.
  • Dev Tools now has a full-page color contrast audit feature. This helps you quickly identify any contrast shortcomings, with badging and filtering of the accessibility tree. Simply click the contrast button in the Accessibility toolbar to run the audit.
  • Don't miss These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 57 for an in-depth look at what's happening with Firefox development. These Weeks In Firefox offers details from across the Firefox development effort for the last couple of weeks.

2019-04-15

• Firefox 66.0.3 is our currently stable release. It shipped last Wednesday and fixes several minor issues.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release users on May 14th. Beta 11 and 12 go out this week.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on July 9th. Over the last week there have been about 535 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable changes.
  • Qualified Linux machines now get WebRender. These include Linux machines using Intel graphics with Mesa drivers being at least v18.2.8.0, excluding 4k displays.
  • A significant portion of Nightly users are now seeing the new Quantumbar which should behave the same as the Awesomebar but lays the foundation for making improvements easier over time.
  • Dev Tools got a button for toggling print styles. This makes debugging print output much simpler.
  • Dev Tools console can now be filtered by regular expressions. Any text enclosed between forward slashes is considered as a regex search.
  • Accessibility of PanelMultiView has been improved. Elements that are initially disabled and enabled later will be navigable. Also, the toolbar overflow menu with search will be properly navigable.

2019-04-08

• Firefox 66.0.2 is our currently stable release. The gradual roll-out for blocking auto-play of media with sound has completed.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and moves to the stable release on May 14th. Beta 9 and 10 (of 16 planned) ship this week. Over the last week we've uplifted about 60 changes to the Beta channel including an updated dav1d decoder which should bring dramatic performance improvements to AV1 decoding for many of our users.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our Stable release on July 9th. Over the last week there have been 493 changes landed in Nightly including these notable ones:
  • Firefox now requires user interaction for push notification prompts. This means a site cannot simply pop up the request on page load.
  • Retained Display List has been enabled for Android. You can read more about RDL (a performance optimizatio which landed in Desktop 61, almost a year ago) at this blog post.
  • CodeMirror is now more accessible. CodeMirror is a JS text editor used in Firefox Developer Tools. This makes edit as HTML work for screenreaders.
  • A regression that was causing pinned tabs to shift left putting the left-most one off-screen has been fixed.
  • A crash that lots of macOS users of New Twitter were seeing is now fixed.
  • Save to Pocket and Add Bookmark have been added to Pocket Recommended Stories' context menu on the New Tab Page.
  • Picture in Picture, still behind the about:config flag media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled now has a toggle to enable and play, pause, close, and un-pip controls.

2019-04-01

• Firefox 66.0.2 is our currently stable release. This second dot release shipped last Wednesday to fix a web compatibility issues with Office 365, iCloud and IBM WebMail caused by recent changes to the handling of keyboard events (Bug 1538966)
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and moves to the stable release on May 14th. Beta 7 and 8 (of 16 planned) ship this week so we're coming up on the half way mark for this cycle. Over the last week we've uplifted about 60 fixes to the Beta channel including the new Accounts toolbar button.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th. Over the last week there have been 525 fixes landed on Nightly including these notable changes:
  • We fixed a regression where Windows Preview per Tab was broken (and uplifted the fix to Beta.)
  • (Device Pairing Phase 1) Desktop Auth was enabled for pairing the Reference Browser to Desktop using the QR code experience. (This has also been uplifted to Beta.)
  • A 16 year old Gecko feature request, support for the ::marker pseudo-element on list items was resolved FIXED! the ::marker CSS pseudo-element selects the marker box of a list item, which typically contains a bullet or number. This allows list item markers to be styled or have their content value customized. Thanks, Mats Palmgren (:mats) for the new Gecko feature and Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) for the code reviews!

2019-03-25

• Firefox 66.0.1 is our current stable release. The new version shipped last week. We had a quick point release for a couple of security issues disclosed at the pwn2own contest. Firefox 66 users are enjoying these new features:
  • Blocking of auto-play media with sound.
  • Scroll anchoring.
  • Basic touchbar support for macOS.
  • Default of 8 content processes up from 4.
  • Redesigned certificate error pages.
  • Support for Windows Hello on Windows 10.
• Firefox 67 is in the Beta channel and moves to the stable release on May 14. Tomorrow the 5th Beta (of 16 planned) goes out.
• Firefox 68 is in the Nightly channel and moves to the stable release on July 9th. Over the last week there have been about 490 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable changes:
  • We've adjusted the available memory tracker thresholds to minimize out of memory crashes. Now that Firefox can smartly unload tabs when short on memory, we're updating the definition of short on memory to be a bit higher to avoid even more out of memory crashes.
  • The dav1d decoder has been enabled for Linux. Last week it was enabled for Mac and the week before it was enabled for Linux. We now have dav1d decoding on all three of our desktop platforms!
  • We've updated the dav1d decoder to version 0.2.1 for some serious performance improvements. This fixes a couple of crashes and makes decoding about 3 times faster for many users on old CPUs. If all goes well in testing, this update will be pushed to 67 Beta so our users get the perf win even sooner.
  • Another eviltraps bug is squashed. With the changes at Bug 1532338 - Stronger auth dialog abuse enforcement we now make the block apply to the domain of the top-level frame (i.e. what's in the URL bar) instead of the sub-resource, and we reduce the number of allowed cancellations to 2. This should help users encountering evil sites that used the authentication dialog to attack users.
  • Firefox now has an entry point to access saved logins from the main menu providing even easier access to existing saved logins. This change was also uplifted to Beta 67.
  • Firefox now has an avatar toolbar button with menu in the main toolbar for easier discovery of Firefox accounts and Sync capabilities. From the menu, you can quickly access your Firefox account and sent tabs; you can view synced tabs and synced tabs sidebar; and connect to another device, manage your account, and change your sync settings.
  • We have enabled WebRender for a whole class of AMD GPUs. These are the Cayman (Northern Islands) graphics chips release starting in 2010.
  • We fixed a regression causing Office365 PowerPoint text to vanish after typing. This change is being evaluated for uplift to Beta and stable Release. It's a pref flip so should be safe.
  • GeckoView has support for Web App Manifests which is a step along the way to PWA support in Fenix.
  • We now require a user gesture to enable push notifications. This means that a site can't pop up the "want notifications" dialog until a user has interacted with the page. This change applies to desktop Firefoxen as well as Android Firefox.
  • Firefox for ARM64 devices now have Ion JIT support. This applies to both the Windows on Snapdragon laptops as well as Firefox for Android.
  • We now have Live Region support on Android. This accessibility feature allows screen readers to know when content has updated.
  • Firefox on Windows on Snapdragon (ARM64) now supports DRM content like Netflix.
  • Last but not least, we got a nice fix to the Reader Mode from a volunteer contributor. The Reader Mode toolbar no longer zooms when you zoom the content with Ctrl/Cmd + and -.

2019-03-18

• Firefox 65.0.2 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 66 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release tomorrow, March 19th.
  • Firefox 66 users will enjoy the new block auto-play feature that blocks media with sound from automatically playing. Users can add exceptions for sites they want to auto-play (gradual roll-out.)
  • We've also got a new feature called scroll-anchoring which prevents the page from jumping up and down as new content loads in while you're scrolling.
  • macOS users will get basic touchbar support.
  • And all users will enjoy improved performance and stability as we've doubled the number of default Firefox processes from 4 to 8.
• Today is merge day. Beta becomes Firefox 67 and Nightly becomes Firefox 68.
• The Nightly channel received about 450 bug fixes over the last week including these notable changes:
  • the new New Tab page now has a dismiss a story menu option.
  • dav1d is now the default AV1 decoder in macOS.
  • Buttons in Reader Mode's "type control" popup now have tooltips making them more accessible.
  • Send Tab now uses one notification instead of many for sending groups of tabs.
  • Developer Tools now has the Ctrl/Cmd + K keyboard shortcut to clear the console.

2019-03-11

• Firefox 65.0.2 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 66 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release next week on March 19th. Tomorrow we push RC1 live.
• Firefox 67 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on May 14th. Today is the beginning of our soft code freeze. Over the last week there have been about 570 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable ones:
  • Any new extensions added to Firefox won't be enabled in Private Browsing unless you allow it in settings.
  • Dev Tools got the much-requested column resizer for the request list.
  • Dynamic module import has been set to ride the trains.
  • Continuing work to make the main toolbar accessible, it is now possible to activate browser toolbar overflow panels from the keyboard and the Download button is also keyboard accessible.
  • The Contextual Feature Recommender template has been updated with a new UI.
  • The Dav1d AV1 decoder has been enabled by default on Windows.
  • Gecko now supports the CSS revert keyword. This allows authors to ignore all CSS rules in a given cascade origin, while applying rules from other cascade origins.
  • The new New Tab page got some improvements including a pref to opt out of CFR, Dark Mode support, Context menu support, and the CFR for Pinned Tabs.
  • We've added an "import" option to the file menu to make browser migration more discoverable.
  • The permission selector for block auto-play is now keyboard accessible.

2019-03-04

• Firefox 65.0.2 is our current stable release. This dot release went out on Thursday, February 28th and addresses an issue with geolocation services affecting Windows users.
• Firefox 66 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release on March 19th. Our final Betas, Beta 13 and 14 go out this Tuesday and Friday. Over the last week we've uplifted over 50 fixes from Nightly to Beta including a frequently reported issue with PDF printing.
• Firefox 67 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on May 14th. Over the last week there have been nearly 600 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable changes:
  • Firefox on Windows will now automatically unload tabs in low memory situations. Tabs are discarded in least recently used order. First to be discarded are regular tabs, then pinned tabs, then tabs playing audio, then pinned tabs playing audio.
  • For quick access to saved logins, the password manager autocomplete pop-up now has a "View Saved Logins" item.
  • GeckoView allows embedders to load WebExtensions such as content scripts. This may be used by GeckoView apps for features like ad blocking and reader mode.
  • GeckoView now has an API for taking screenshots. This may be used for adding screenshots to the Fenix tabs tray.
  • Push notifications now require a secure context. This brings Firefox in line with Chrome and helps to advance a more secure web.
  • Firefox now syncs the options to block cryptominers and fingerprinters. As we bring new preferences online, we need to sync those preferences.
  • Gecko now has support for capping the maximum life-time of client-side cookies. This is a feature Safari already has and may be useful as sites begin to work around tracker cookie blocking.
  • Firefox now includes an about:compat page which lists active site patches. These are the patches managed by Firefox's webcompat system addon.
  • A 17 year old bug #148794, document.write into iframe adds entries into session history was fixed by BZ's patches at bug 1489308, Align document.open() with overhauled spec. document.open no longer adds session history entries.

2019-02-25

• Firefox 65.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 66 is in the Beta channel and ships to our release audience on March 19th. Beta 9 and 10 shipped last week and Beta 11 and 12 ship tomorrow and Friday. Over the last week we've uplifted about 30 bugs from Nightly to Beta including a change to themes that I'll go into in the Nightly section, a fix for PDFs, and a fix for links from external apps opening in the wrong window.
• Firefox 67 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable on May 14th. Over the last week there have been about 450 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable ones:
  • Firefox's Dark and Light themes no longer honor the Windows 10 setting for accent colors in the titlebar.
  • Cryptomining and fingerprinting blocking options are now available in the Custom section of Content Blocking in the Firefox Options/Preferences.
  • Pin tab is now available in the Page Actions menu.
• And because we were out last week due to a U.S. holiday, here are some of the 500 bugs resolved as fixed in the previous week:
  • Firefox now supports the CSS prefers-color-scheme media feature.
  • Behind the pref browser.toolbars.keyboard_navigation the main Firefox toolbar is now keyboard and screen reader accessible.
  • Firefox now syncs the pref for blocking media with sound from autoplaying.
  • Behind the pref media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled Firefox now has rudimentary support for picture in picture.
  • The Accessibility Inspector sidebar now has color and contrast check information.
  • GeckoView now has support for D-pad scrolling and navigation.
  • Firefox for Windows 10 on Snapdragon (ARM64) now has accessibility support working.

2019-02-11

• Firefox 65.0 is our current stable release. With Firefox 65, you have an easy way to block third-party content that tracks you around the web and to control how much of your online activity gets stored and shared between websites. There's an updated Language section in Preferences where it's easy to install multiple language packs and order language preferences for Firefox and websites. And, in Firefox 65, you have a revamped Task Manager, found at about:performance that, along with energy usage now reports memory usage for your tabs and add-ons.
• Firefox 66 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on March 19th. Beta 7 is due out tomorrow. If all goes well with testing, Firefox 66 is going to deliver tracking protection enabled by default for a percentage of users, and blocking of video autoplay for all users.
• Firerox 67 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable on May 14th. Over the last week there have been about 460 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones:
  • WebRender was enabled for two more architectures, AMD's Southern Islands and Intel's Haswell on destop.
  • Firefox now provides visual feedback when a password field is autofilled bringing password fields in line with autofilled form fields.
  • The new Pocket New Tab experience has been enabled (though it's not scheduled to ride the trains until 68.)
  • Return to AMO has been enabled.
  • Screenshots upload has been disabled and Screenshots now has a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+S.
  • And you now have the option to save passwords in Private Browsing mode.
• Read on for a a quick run down of some of the 540+ bugs resolved during the prior week:
  • Profile per install landed. With Firefox 67, Firefox uses a dedicated profile for each Firefox version, Nightly, Beta, Developer Edition, and ESR.
  • Firefox has a new about:config.
  • WebRender is now enabled in Nightly for a subset of modern Intel GPUs and modern desktop AMD GPUs.
  • WebRender can now be enabled on the Beta channel with the about:config pref gfx.webrender.all
  • Last but not least, we've done some cleanup to the about:support modified prefs section by removing the noisy printer prefs.

2019-01-28

• Firefox 64.02 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 65 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable tomorrow, January 29th. We're currently in our release candidate (RC) phase so builds on the Beta channel look a lot like release builds in the About Firefox dialog.
• Firefox 66 was is in the Nightly channel last week. (It just flipped over to 67 today.) Over the last week 560 bugs have been resolved including these notable ones:
  • Firefox now has basic support for the Mac Touchbar.
  • The old style system has been removed and we're now using Stylo everywhere.
  • Blocking video auto-play can now be managed from the Control Center. Users can add individual sites to an exceptions list or turn the blocking off from that UI.
  • The crash reporter now supports high DPI scaling so text is no longer blurry there on high DPI setups.
  • The home page in a Private Browsing windows now includes a search field which uses your default search engine.
  • The Windows installer is about twice as fast on ARM64 systems.
  • Firefox Sync now syncs the "Show tab previews in the Windows taskbar" option, the "Play DRM-controlled content" option, and the "Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf" option.
• And because we weren't here last week, I'll also share a few of the 540 changes that went in then:
  • We now have a "Manage extensions shortcuts" item in the gear menu of the Add-ons manager allowing users to change extension keyboard shortcuts.
  • Firefox now syncs the Firefox Home content preferences.
  • VR now has its own process.
  • We made a change to font weights on Mac because some fonts were lighter weight after updating from macOS 10.13 to 10.14 Mojave.
  • We fixed a regression that was causing Gmail scrolling to be jumpy with scroll anchoring enabled.
  • Firefox now hides the Pocket context menu and library panel items when Pocket is disabled in about:config.
  • On Linux the Title Bar is now merged with the Tab Bar by default. This brings linux up to speed with Windows and Mac.

2019-01-14

• Firefox 64.02 is our current stable release. This point release came out on January 9th and addresses several issues including:
  • A browser crash on MacOS
  • Video stuttering on Youtube
• Firefox 65 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on January 29th. We're currently in our 10th Beta with Beta 11 coming out tomorrow. We only have 12 Betas planned so we're in the end game now. If you've got bug fixes that need to make Firefox 65, time is short so get those uplift requests in today!
• Firefox 66 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable on March 19th. Over the last week there have been 500 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones:
  • We implemented Scroll anchoring. As a page is loading, new elements can show up above the scrolled to part of the screen and that causes the page to shift creating a poor user experience. Scroll anchoring attempts to mitigate this and prevent thescreen from shifting when new elements are added above the scroll position.
  • We now have main process crash reporting on ARM64 Windows builds. We don't have content process crash reporting yet. That's being worked on in bug 1517729
  • We also have stub installer support for ARM64 Windows builds. The standard stub installer now recognizes Windows on Snapdragon and downloads and installs the appropriate bits.
  • WebRender has been moved to mozilla-central. Before, WebRender was developed on Github and work was transferred to mozilla-central. Now the canonical home for WebRender is in mozilla-central's gfx/wr directory. WebRender's Github is now a downstream mirror of mozilla-central. This also means that WebRender bugs and patches should be filed in Bugzilla rather than Github.
  • The en-US dictionary got and update and now includes the word "hooptie" among several other additions.
  • Last but not least, a 15 year old layout bug was fixed. The bug, Deeply nested elements are not rendered was fixed by Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)
• In other Firefox news:
  • We are now scheduled to disable Flash in Firefox 69 which moves to the Stable release on August 3rd. The change will land in the 69 Nightly cycle and ride the trains.
  • If you haven't yet, check out the great Hacks blog post on the design and development of the Flexbox Inspector. The Flexbox inspector is available in the Dev Edition and hits our stable release with Firefox 65 next month.

2019-01-07

• Firefox 64 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 65 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on January 29th. We're currently on our 8th Beta with Beta 9 due out tomorrow. We have 12 Betas scheduled so we're getting into the final quarter. If you've got things that need to make it into 65, time is running short.
• Firefox 66 is in the Nightly channel and moves to stable release on March 19th. It's been three weeks since our last update and in that time we've resolved about 800 bugs including these notable ones:
  • Still behind a flag, we've implemented the dynamic import() proposal. Enabling dynamic import by default is being tracked in bug 1517546.
  • WebExtensions got a clipboard api that supports copying arbitrary strings to the clipboard.
  • Firefox now supports the overflow-block and overflow-inline media queries.
  • A regression that was causing YouTube stuttering (frames dropped) on VP9 videos is now fixed (and uplifted to Beta).
  • We've got "search handoff" on the New Tab Page. So when you start typing in the search box it moves the typing and results to the Awesomebar.
• In addition to all these great changes in Nightly, we've also go the addition of a new platform. We now have untested nightly builds for the Windows on Snapdragon platform. This is Windows running on ARM processors which will become a fully supported platform this year.

2018-12-17

• The Firefox 64 Stable release came out last week. 64 includes the feature recommender, multi-tab operations, a new task manager, and various other features and fixes. Check it out!
  • The ability to select multiple tabs and then move them, re-window them, close them, bookmark, send to device, etc. was a hit with the press, making appearances in the titles of most articles about 64. This feature was made possible because of Google Summer of Code, mentoring from Mozilla's Jared Wein (:jaws) and the hard work of a student named Abdoulaye O. Ly. If you haven't tried this out, it's really cool for reordering tabs, de-cluttering your tab strip, or sending off a group of tabs to your mobile Firefox.
  • You can read more about Firefox 64 at the hacks blog, which covers just about everything you'd want to know about the release, and at MDN which deep dives on changes that web developers and add-on developers will care about.
• Firefox 65 is in the Beta channel and moves to the stable Release on January 29th. If you're on the Beta channel, you're probably using the 4th beta and the 5th beta is due tomorrow. Over the last week, we've uplifted about 40 bugs to Beta, including several crash fixes, enabling the AV1 video format, and fixing selection color visibility on dark backgrounds on macOS
• Firefox 66 is in the Nightly channel and moves to the Stable release on March 19th. Over the last two weeks we've resolved about 600 issues including these notable ones:
  • Use level 1 headings for major groups in Preferences This makes our accessibility in Preferences better. (Fixed before the uplift so present in 65)
  • Add a new error page for MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_MITM_DETECTED This means some of the people who have their browser connection completely broken by AV and other third party software will get a warning that actually explains to them what's going on. (Fixed before the uplift so present in 65)
  • Implement win/osx sandboxing for new RDD process RDD is Remote Data Decoder which is the new process for media used by AV1 and soon other formats. It's now sandboxed on Windows and macOS (Fixed before the uplift so present in 65)
  • Last but not least 17 year old bug 167475 Disable external and returning no data protocol handlers in all cases, excluding <A HREF=> was fixed. From the patch "This is done in order to block external protocol URLs in iframes, which cannot be used to create documents, and they could exec external apps or show prompt dialogs."

2018-12-03

• It's #mozlando2018 so this is read-only.
• Firefox 63.0.3 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on December 11th - that's next Tuesday!
• Today is Merge day. The Nightly channel becomes Firefox 66. In the final week of Nightly 65, we had nearly 650 bugs resolved as fixed. That's quite a bit for the final week of a cycle. Notable changes included:
  • A change for Linux users where they can switch tabs with the mouse wheel if there's no overflow.
  • About six weeks ago we introduced the idea of tab succession This week, that work has been extended with APIs that make it useful for extension developers.
  • A next-generation local storage implementation landed.
  • We fixed a short-lived regression where extensions weren't loading in Nightly
  • We fixed another regression where users couldn't drag the window by the titlebar
  • We got a sub-panel for cookies in the Control Center
  • Firefox users will now see a permission doorhanger when sites request storage access.
  • Flexbox highlighter and inspector tools are enabled to ride the trains with 65.
  • Last but not least, we landed a giant change to reformat the codebase to Google coding style.

2018-11-26

• Firefox 63.0.3 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on December 11th. Beta 13 ships tomorrow, and Beta 14, our final beta, goes out Thursday.
• Firefox 65 is in the Nightly channel. Next Monday, December 3rd, is Merge Day and the beginning of the Firefox 66 Nightly cycle. Over the last week, we've resolved about 490 bugs including these notable changes:
  • We now block access to storage from tracking resources by default on all desktop platforms
  • We've fixed an Android web compat issue by choosing the same initial zoom level as other browsers.
  • The new about:peformance "Task Manager" now has a memory column.
  • We have implemented a new preferences design for Content Blocking.
  • We fixed a bug where pinned tabs showed during fullscreen video playback.
  • There's a new pref for whitelisting specific domains and URLs from being subject to third-party cookie blocking from trackers only
  • The build team has added aarch64 to automation so people don't break the build and so that anybody adding features can at least get builds through try
  • Firefox for iOS got a new library Panel. It's the new home for bookmarks/history/readinglist/downloads.

2018-11-19

• Firefox 63.0.3 is our current release. It shipped last Thursday and fixes a small collection of bugs including a problem with Unity WebGL games, a few crashes, and disabling HTTP response throttling which was causing problems with video playing in background tabs.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on December 11th. Our 10th Beta shipped on Friday and Beta 11 goes out tomorrow. We have 14 Betas scheduled for this cycle so we're getting close to the end game. Over the last week, we've uplifted about 30 fixes to the Beta channel including these notable changes:
  • Move the 'Close Other Tabs' and 'Close Tabs to the Right' back to the main tab context menu and out of a submenu.
  • RTL support for the new about:performance page
  • The Share button can again be pinned to the addressbar
• Firefox 65 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week, we've resolved about 480 bugs including these notable changes:
  • The Streams API has been enabled by default
  • We now run all MediaDataDecoder in their own decoder process
  • WebP image support has been enabled by default
  • We've implemented the JavaScript globalThis proposal
  • The Control Center now has a sub-panel for Trackers
  • We fixed a regression where Pocket icons were displayed multiple times in the addressbar
  • We've implemented and enabled in Nightly the Reporting API
  • The en-US dictionary got some new words, including "dispositive" "findable" and "headspace"
• In addition to all these great improvements in Nightly and Beta channels, last week we also released an update to our Firefox Monitor service for users on our Stable release channel. The first version was a service that let you check your email address against a known list of breaches and sign up for email alerts for future breaches. The second version, launched last Wednesday, will give you an alert right in Firefox when you visit a website that's had a breach in the last 12 months. We've also increased Firefox Monitor's global reach by expanding it to 26 languages. Congratulations to the Firefox Monitor team and all the amazing volunteers that helped localize into so many languages.
• And if that wasn't enough, last week we also launched Price Wise in Test Pilot in time for the holiday gift buying season. Price Wise gives people using Firefox the ability to track product prices across the major online retailers and get a desktop notification automatically every time the price drops.

2018-11-12

• Firefox 63.0.1 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on December 11th. Our 8th Beta shipped on Friday and Beta 9 goes out tomorrow. We have 14 Betas scheduled for this cycle.
• Firefox 65 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week we've resolved about 500 bugs including these notable ones:
  • Warn when quitting and closing multiple tabs is now available even if you have Firefox set to restore your previous session.
  • WhatsApp Web is no longer unusably slow for longer conversations thanks to the Layout fix at bug 1505254
  • eviltraps bug 675574 is fixed which prevents sites from opening multiple pop-ups with one click. Now there's only one window.open() allowed for an event.
  • eviltraps bug 685828 is fixed which prevents sites from hanging Firefox with while(true) {window.open(...);} It was fixed by limiting displaying blocked popups in the front-end.
  • A regression in macOS back and forward gestures was fixed.
  • A regression in playing Amazon Prime videos was fixed.
  • We now have an MSI installer as an exe wrapper
  • Gecko on desktop now supports CSS Environment Variables.
  • GeckoView got a Media API
  • Android scrolling (Gecko and GeckoView) got better by dispatching vsync notifications on the UI thread. A special thanks to mark.paxman99 for all the testing and help on this bug.
  • The new about:performance now has RTL support

2018-11-05

• Firefox 63.0.1 is our current Stable release. It shipped last Wednesday and primarily addressed an issue with snippets not showing up in the new tab page.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable on December 11th. Beta 7 (of 14 planned) will ship tomorrow.
• Firefox 65 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week we've resolved about 470 bugs including these notable ones:
  • Gecko now has support for the WebP image format. It will be enabled by default after we've had a chance to fuzz test for security.
  • A regression with sessions timing out too quickly that crept in on Halloween was quickly fixed.
  • Activity Stream (New Tab Page) now runs in its own process.
  • We got a fix for vibrancy in WebRender on macOS that was causing the tab strip to be black with unreadable text even with the light theme.
  • GeckoView now has about:config support.
  • Dark and Light themes now honor the Windows 10 accent color setting.
  • We've disabled HTTP response throttling because it was breaking some videos playing in the background.

2018-10-29

• Firefox 63 is our current Stable release. It shipped last week and contains opt-in content blocking for all users and improved performance and energy efficiency on Mac.
• Firefox 64 is in the Beta channel and moves to Stable release on December 11th. We're in our 5th of 14 planned betas.
• Firefox 65 is now the Nightly channel. Over the last week, we've resolved more than 460 bug reports in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • We now support the Handoff web browsing activity type on macOS
  • WebRender is working in GeckoView thought not enabled by default.
  • We are now using the strict list for default cookie restrictions on Nightly and early Betas.

2018-10-22

• Firefox 62.0.3 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 63 is in the Beta channel and moves to the Stable release tomorrow. Web Render is now enabled in the Beta channel but won't be enabled for the Stable release for a few more cycles.
• Firefox 64 is our Nightly release. Over the last week we've resolved more than 500 reports including these:
  • Windows Firefox now has support for the native Windows "Share" feature.
  • Firefox now shows when an extension is controlling the notifications permission.
  • PaymentRequest has been enabled for Mac and Windows for the US and Canada.
  • about:performance now shows a type and action column and you can now access about:performance from the Task Manager item in the More submenu of the main Firefox menu
  • The Flexbox highlighter and inspector have been enabled in Dev Tools.
  • Dev Tools now has XHR breakpoints.
  • Blocking access to storage from tracking resources has been enabled.
  • Firefox now links to the site's certificate on error pages where it makes sense to do so
  • The contextual feature recommender now has an opt out preference.
  • The en-us dictionary learned a few new words.
  • Firefox will now install the related dictionaries when a new language pack is installed.
  • Firefox will now Suggest search engine aliases in the address bar when '@' is typed as the first character

2018-10-15

• Firefox 62.0.3 is our current stable release. It shipped October 2nd and fixed a macOS Mojave bug that was causing hangs and freezes with native dialogs.
• Firefox 63 is in the Beta channel. Over the last week we've approved and landed about 40 fixes on the Beta channel. We're currently testing our 14th and final Beta build for desktop. Firefox 63 moves to the stable release next week.
• Firefox 64 is our Nightly release. Soft code freeze is today. Over the last week there have been about 420 bugs fixed including these:
  • The add-ons screen has been redesigned
  • WebVR has been (re)enabled for macOS
  • There's now an option to select audio output device (implement HTMLMediaElement.setSinkId)
  • Firefox can now handle system mailto calls by opening a webmail app that is registered within Firefox as mailto handler.
• And because I wasn't here to mention them, there were a couple notable changes from last week:
  • Implement ToastNotification for Action Center (Notification Center) on Windows 10
  • Tab multi-select was enabled by default.
  • Improve the Inspector load speed

2018-10-01

• Firefox 62.0.2 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 63 is our current Beta release. Over the last week we've taken approximately 40 fixes into the Beta.
• Firefox 64 is our Nightly release. Over the last week there have been 410 bugs fixed including these:
  • We now have Enterprise policy support on macOS
  • A fix for Firefox on macOS Mojave hanging with modal dialogs.
  • Scrollbar styling (Enable scrollbar-color and scrollbar-width by default) has been enabled.
  • When you have only the search bar showing on Firefox's new tab page, we now display the Firefox logo and wordmark above the search.
  • To block DLL injections into Firefox, we're making some changes to how Firefox starts up. The launcher process is part of that and was just enabled on Nightly.
  • We got WebRTC working in GeckoView and GeckoView got an API for pop-up blocking.

2018-09-24

• Firefox 62.0.2 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 63 is our current Beta release. Over the last week we've taken approximately 60 fixes into the Beta.
• Firefox 64 is our Nightly release and over the last week there have been nearly 500 bugs fixed including these notable ones:
  • Support for auto-completing about: addresses in the Awesomebar.
  • Anti-virus software is removing language packs rendering Firefox unusable. We fixed it by always checking langpacks for modification at startup.

2018-09-17

• Firefox 62.0 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 63 is our current Beta release. There have been about 43 fixes uplifted to Beta in the last week.
• Firefox 64 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 420 fixes including these notable ones:
  • WebRender has been enabled for a subset of Nightly users on Windows 10 desktops with Nvidia GPUs. If you don't meet the criteria (only about 17% of Nightly users do right now) but you'd nevertheless like to try out WebRender on Nightly, you can flip the about:config pref gfx.webrender.all to true. This is an important milestone for a key performance feature on the Firefox Roadmap. Congratulations to the Servo and Gecko teams! If you want to learn more about WebRender (and browser engines in general) I highly recommend Lin Clark's The whole web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank on the Mozilla Hacks Blog.

2018-09-10

• Firefox 62.0 is our current Stable release. 62 shipped last Wednesday and today people all over the world are enjoying more customization of the Firefox home page and a Canadian localized version of Firefox.
• Firefox 63 is our current Beta release. There have been about 28 fixes uplifted to Beta in the last week including the enabling of tab mulit-select features. I believe this is for more widespread testing but the features aren't intended to hit the Stable release until Firefox 64.
• Firefox 64 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 400 fixes including these notable ones:
  • The sidebar is now styled properly in the dark theme.
  • The erroneous sharp corners on CSD browser windows are fixed on Linux.
  • People can now easily remove an extension by right-clicking on its toolbar icon.
  • about:crashes got a UI update.

2018-08-27

• Firefox 61.0.2 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and hits Stable release on September 5th. There have been about 20 fixes uplifted to Beta in the last week.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and graduates to Stable release on October 23. In the last week there have been about 425 fixes including these notable ones:
  • The Theme API has been extended to include browser sidebars.
  • A 10 year old bug, float pushed down one line with white-space: nowrap; was fixed.

2018-08-20

• Firefox 61.0.2 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and hits Stable release on September 5th. Beta 19 (of 20) goes out tomorrow. In the last week there have been about 30 bugs uplifted to Beta.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and graduates to Stable on October 23. In the last week there have been about 375 bugs fixed including these notable ones:
  • Web Components are enabled. (Enable Shadow DOM and Enable Custom Elements)
  • Enforce Symantec Distrust in Firefox 63
  • Last but not least, Top Sites Search Shortcuts, a collection of features to make searching easier, has landed.

2018-08-06

• Firefox 61.0.1 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and hits Stable release on September 5th. Beta 15 goes out tomorrow. There are 20 betas scheduled for this cycle.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable on October 23. Over the last week, there have been about 380 bugs fixed including:
  • Firefox has a new Preferences/Options section for Content Blocking that includes Tracking Protection. You can find it in the Privacy and Security section of the Options/Preferences window.
  • The 6th most voted for bug of all time, Support the "discarded" property inside browser.tabs.create() has been fixed.

2018-07-30

• Firefox 61.0.1 is our current Stable release. 61 was first offered on June 26. Users on this release are enjoying faster page rendering thanks to Quantum CSS improvements and the new retained display list feature, and Faster switching between tabs thanks to the "tab warming" feature.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on September 5th. Beta users are helping test improvements to the bookmarks panel, the three pane inspector in developer tools, and a new Tracking Protection button in the hamburger menu. Over the last week, the Beta channel has seen 26 bugs uplifted from Nightly.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable on October 23. Over the last week, there have been about 400 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable changes:
  • Firefox now supports the CSS prefers-reduced-motion media feature on Windows. This makes it possible to disable motion effects for those with vestibular disorders or those who simply prefer their experiences without motion effects.
  • Firefox now supports switching to installed locales from the Options/Preferences window.
  • Out of process extensions for Linux has been enabled. Mac got this feature in Firefox 61 and Windows got it in 56.
  • About:profiles "launch profile in new browser" now works for Windows users thanks to the addition of the -no-remote option. Before, for most users, the button would simply launch another window from the current profile.
  • Time Travel Debugging has landed behind the devtools.recordreplay.enabled pref. Once enabled, it is accessed via the 'Tools -> Web Developer' menu. Time Travel Debugging allows Firefox content processes to record their behavior, replay it later, and rewind to earlier states. Replaying processes preserve all the same JS behavior, DOM structures, graphical updates, and most other behaviors that occurred while recording. The browser's JS debugger can be used to inspect and control the replay. This is Mac-only for now.
  • Web developers get a new feature with Clear Site Data to allow web developers more control over the data stored locally by a user agent for their origins. This was implemented in Firefox 62 but behind a pref. Now it's enabled.
  • For new profiles, Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order is the new default. Instead of tabbing through the tabs on your tab strip in that order, you'll get a pop-up with tiles for the the most recently used 6 tabs. This more closely mirrors the operating system's window switching interface.
  • Firefox has a new and improved about:performance that's behind the about:config pref dom.performance.enable_scheduler_timing (Be sure to restart after the pref change to avoid a crash).
  • Last but not least, Firefox Certificate Error Pages got new copy that should be more helpful to users encountering the errors.

2018-07-23

• Firefox 61.0.1 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and goes to Stable release on September 5th. Over the last week, we've had about 40 bugs uplifted to Beta.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and moves to Stable release on October 23. Over the last week, Firefox has had more than 350 fixes and changes.
  • Tab multi-select has been enabled. You can now select a group of tabs to manage, and move them, pin them, bookmark them, etc.
  • Block auto-play has been enabled. You will now get a permission doorhanger when a site attempts to auto-play.
  • The "Never check for updates" option has been removed from Options/Preferences. "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" remains, and the default is still "Automatically install updates (recommended)"
  • We now support security.enterprise_roots.enabled on macOS. If the preference is set to true, Firefox will import trusted TLS root certificates from the macOS keystore.
  • We support Picture in Picture mode for Android Firefox. This makes watching a video while you surf the web a breeze.
  • 12 year old bug Proxy autodiscovery doesn't check DHCP was fixed.

2018-07-16

• Firefox 61.0.1 is our current Stable release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and becomes our Stable release on September 5th. Over the last week, we've had about 50 bugs uplifted to Beta.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and moves to the Stable release on October 23. Over the last week, Firefox has had more than 300 fixes and changes including these notable ones:
  • Firefox will now change to dark or light mode depending on your Windows setting.
  • The Tracking Protection indicator in the addressbar is now animated to be more visible to users.
  • The preferences backend has been re-designed to better work with our multi-process architecture.

2018-07-09

• Firefox 61.0.1 is our current release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on September 5th. Over the last week, we've had about 40 bugs uplifted to beta.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on October 23rd. Over the last week there have been about 300 bugs resolved as fixed.
  • When a user has set search results to open in a new tab but the current tab is blank, we now re-use the blank tab.
  • OMTP has been enabled for Linux builds.
  • Firefox will no longer create smart bookmark folders for new profiles.
  • We've also dropped support for the description field from bookmarks.
  • Firefox now has a Restore Defaults button for the home page preferences.
  • Platform support for XUL overlays has been removed.
  • For those who have the tab selection about:config pref set, you can now reload a selection of tabs
  • Last but not least, a 15 year old bug that should help with mobile web compatibility, add window.event object to the DOM to ease cross browser scripting has been fixed.

2018-07-02

• Firefox 61.0 is our current release.
• Firefox 62 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on September 5th. In the last week there have been about a dozen uplifts to beta.
• Firefox 63 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on October 23rd. In the last week there have been about 350 non-test bugs resolved fixed including these notable changes:
  • A fifteen year old bug, Support CSS3 content property replacement of element, was fixed.
  • column and row gap for flexbox landed.
  • Users can opt out of seeing the editor when they bookmark thanks to the fix at bug 1459878
  • Firefox now has infrastructure to move Activity Stream into its own process
  • Users who have enabled multi-select tabs can now pin/unpin a selection of tabs.
  • The Open bookmark in sidebar feature has been removed

2018-06-25

• Firefox 60.0.2 is our current release.
• Firefox 61 goes to release tomorrow and includes these notable improvements.
  • Faster page rendering thanks to parallel CSS parsing and the new retained display list feature
  • Faster tab switching thanks to tab warming on Windows and Linux
  • You can now add new search engines from the Page Actions menu.
  • On Mac you can now share the URL of an active tab from the Page Actions menu.
  • TLS 1.3 is enabled by default.
  • The Dark theme is darker in more places.
  • Web Extensions can now hide tabs and control the order in which new tabs open.

2018-06-04

• Firefox 60.0.1 is our current release.
• Firefox 61 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on June 26th. We're in our 10th Beta with Beta 11 going out tomorrow. In the last week there have been about 40 bugs uplifted to Beta.
• Firefox 62 is in our Nightly channel and goes to release on September 5. In the last week there have been about 360 bugs fixed including these notable changes:
  • Users can now set the number of rows for all sections of the New Tab Page. (bug 1400536)
  • Users can now toggle Tracking Protection from the Firefox menu. (bug 1462468)
  • Shadow DOM support has landed in Nightly. (bug 1460069)
  • Race Cache With Network (RCWN) is enabled on Android when cellular data isn't used. (bug 1377570)

2018-05-14

• Firefox 60 is our current release.
• Firefox 61 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on June 26th. In the last week there have been 16 uplifts to the Beta channel including the enabling of the tab hiding API.
• Firefox 62 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on September 5th. In the last week there have been 360 bug fixes in Nightly including:
  • Remove RDF from Gecko and Firefox
  • Remove the -moz prefix from ::selection
  • Reuse blank tab when opening a bookmark in a new tab
  • Add Heap Snapshot and Analysis tools to Dev Tools
  • enable tab multi-select behind the pref browser.tabs.multiselect
  • Fixed the regression where full tabs opened in the middle of your pinned tabs

2018-05-07

• Firefox 59.0.3 is our current release. The latest point release shipped last Monday for compatibility with the Windows 10 April 2018 update.
• Firefox 60 is wrapping up in the Beta channel and releases this Wednesday. New to 60 are these features:
  • Support for enterprise environments, with a policy engine that allows customized Firefox deployments using Windows Group Policy or a cross-platform JSON file.
  • Several enhancements to New Tab/Firefox Home page
    • A responsive layout that shows more content for users with wide-screen displays
    • The Highlights section includes web pages saved to Pocket
    • There are more options to reorder sections and content on the page
    • Pocket Sponsored Stories will appear for a percentage of en-US users
  • A faster browser UI thanks to Quantum CSS
  • Support for the Web Authentication API, which allows USB tokens for website authentication
  • TLS certificates issued by Symantec before June 1st, 2016 are no longer trusted by Firefox
  • And, last but not least, Firefox for Android gets Quantum CSS for faster web page rendering.
• Firefox 61 was in the Nightly channel under soft code freeze until this morning. It's now in the Beta channel. In the last week we've seen about 350 bugs fixes including these:
  • We now show a doorhanger when an extension hides a tab for the first time
  • Prevent data: URLs from being used for XSS
  • Introduce UI for network throttling in the Dev Tools Net panel
  • Added the remaining 'shape-margin' shape with support for polygon
  • A fix for the blank windows on Mac with WebRender enabled
  • Not riding the trains to Beta just yet, but we now have a English-Canadian nightly build.
• And finally, the Nightly channel is now Firefox 62.

2018-04-30

• Firefox 59.0.2 is our current release.
• Firefox 60 is in the Beta channel and releases on May 9th. Our Release Candidate build happens tomorrow so we're basically wrapped up with Firefox 60. Over the last week, we've seen about 20 fixes uplifted to the Beta channel. A reminder, Firefox 60 is an ESR release. Finally, with Firefox 60 we're going to see Pocket sponsored stories coming to the new tab page. You can read all about that here
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on June 26th. mozilla-central is currently in a soft freeze until after the version bump to 62 on May 7th. Over the last week we've fixed about 480 bugs including these:
  • When there is a hidden tab playing audio there we now have an audio indicator on the all tabs toolbar button.
  • A 12 year old bug was fixed so Proxy autodiscovery now checks DHCP
  • Firefox on Android can now use Chrome's fling physics for scrolling. with the apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.enabled pref set to true.
  • We have much of CSS Shapes Level 1 with the fixes at bug 1353631, shape-outside and bug 1265342, shape-margin

2018-04-23

• Firefox 59.0.2 is our release in market.
• Firefox 60 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on May 9th. 60 is an ESR release. We've been trending at about 50 bug fixes per week in beta. One notable change in Beta, we have disabled "retained display list" and it will now likely ship in 61.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on June 26th. Over the last week, we've fixed about 470 bugs including these notable changes:
  • When Firefox starts up, it now restore windows in reverse z-order, so that the last focused window is restored first and stays in front
  • Firefox will notify users when an extension has updated their home page
  • Firefox on macOS now has out of process extensions
  • Firefox now includes recent downloads in Highlights
  • Firefox Option/Preferences now have a section for managing the different parts of Highlights
  • Firefox on macOS supports the native OS X "Share" feature
  • Stylo, our parallel CSS engine now supports parallel CSS parsing for significant performance wins on some top sites.
  • Firefox now has the Google logo in the search box of the new tab page where before it was just a magnifying glass icon
  • In Firefox devtools users can drag/drop to reorder devtools tabs
  • Firefox devtools has a new feature in the Font editor: UI for variable font instances
• Finally, because I wasn't here for last week's meeting, I wanted to point out that last week an 18 year old bug, #37468, CSSStyleRule.selectorText setter, was fixed by contributor Kerem Kat.

2018-04-16

• Firefox 59.0.2 is our current release.
• Firefox 60 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on May 9th. This is an ESR release.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on June 26th. In the last week we've seen about 460 bugs resolved, including these notable fixes:
  • 18 year old bug bug 37468 was fixed implementing CSSStyleRule.selectorText setter
  • The Gecko Profiler uses less RAM
  • The Dev Tools Browser Console got a new front end
  • The Dev Tools Font Editor got UI to manage font-variation-settings
  • Web Components in Firefox made progress with implementing :host pseudo class
  • Web developers will appreciate that we implemented the DOM Fetch API RequestDestination and Request.destination
  • Web Assembly moved forward with the implementation of basic anyref support
  • Highlights in New Tab Page are now sorted chronologically

2018-04-09

• Firefox 59.0.2 is our current released version.
• Firefox 60 is in Beta and is scheduled to hit release May 9th, a month from today. A reminder that Firefox 60 is our next ESR release so it's going to be supported for a while. In the last week Firefox 60 Beta has seen about 50 fixes including uplifts for the memory leak I mentioned last week and a couple of additional policies for the enterprise-facing policy engine.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel and is due for release on June 26th. In the last week the Nightly channel has seen approximately 460 bugs fixed including a fix for a scroll painting regression. replacing our Emojione implementation with Twitter Emoji (Twemoji) and the addition of about a half a dozen more enterprise policies.
• Mozilla and Firefox have been in the news a lot the last few weeks. Yesterday Mozilla and Firefox were on NBC's Sunday TODAY Show. Check it out. The segment features Mitchell Baker and Amy Tsay.

2018-04-02

• Firefox 59.0.2 is our in-market release. It fixes a couple of significant issues:
  • A fix for page rendering problems for Windows users with ClearType disabled, (Bug 1435472)
  • A temporary fix for a Windows 7 touchscreen crasher, (bug 1424505)
  • A security issue fixed. Use-after-free in compositor, (10th advisory of 2018)
• Firefox 60 Beta 8 is the latest Beta with Beta 9 due tomorrow. A reminder: Firefox 60 is our next ESR. In the last week we've uplifted about 50 bugs.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week we've seen 475 bugs fixed including:
  • You can now find and install available search engines from the Page Action menu (the ... button in your Awesomebar)
  • We fixed a regression that caused the your browser to start in a smaller window before maximizing to expected size.
  • We fixed a memory leak regression involving sites using Service Workers that could cause long pauses or freezes on popular sites.
  • Users of Firefox's built in Dark theme now have a dark New Tab Page.
• Off the trains, the Facebook Container extension, which isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of your web activity, has seen some dramatic uptake by users (200K downloads in first 3 days,) and garnered great reviews and press. We're working on updates expected soon.

2018-03-26

• Firefox 59.0.1 is our current release. People have some nice things to say about it. Today, if all goes according to plan, we'll have a Firefox 59.0.2 release to fix the ClearType rendering regression and the touchscreen crasher regression.
• Firefox 60 is in the Beta channel. Beta 7 is due out tomorrow. In the last week, we've uplifted 53 fixes into Beta including these notable fixes:
  • A fix for pages not rendering correctly for people on Windows with ClearType disabled.
  • Fixes to improve start-up performance by caching plugin and plugin blocklist information.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel. In the last week, we've taken just over 500 fixes including these:
  • The New Tab Page preferences have been migrated to the Options/Preferences window in a new "Home" section.
  • Pinned Top Sites on New Tab Page can use thumbnails instead of icons and people can now set their own images for Top Sites.
  • The dark theme now has dark menus.
  • The new styling engine is now used for the browser's user interface, in addition to web content.
  • Firefox now has support for OpenType variation fonts (CSS font-variation-settings, font-optical-sizing)
• Last but not least, I've published a significant update to the Firefox Product Roadmap and Timeline. The Roadmap document is long-form and attempts to explain what features we're working on and how those features fit into our strategy and the Mozilla mission. The Timeline document is the same information in a spreadsheet for quick viewing. If you haven't, I encourage you all to take a look.

2018-03-19

• Firefox 59 shipped last Tuesday.
  • Firefox 59.01 shipped on Friday to fix a security bug that came out of the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest.
  • We've got one significant regression in this release that causes rendering problems for people who have turned off ClearType font rendering on Windows. The workaround is to re-enable ClearType in Windows or to disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox. Top people are working on it.
• Firefox 60 is in the Beta channel. Our 5th Beta is scheduled for tomorrow. In the last week, we've uplifted approximately 15 fixes.
• Firefox 61 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week there have been approximately 475 fixes landed including these performance improvements:
  • A performance improvement to tab switching by enabling tab warming.
  • A performance improvement for file handling by getting rid of mimetypes.rdf
  • A startup performance improvement by caching plugin and plugin blocklist information.

2018-03-12

• Firefox 59 ships tomorrow, March 13th and includes these changes
  • Option to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device’s camera, microphone, and location
  • Users can choose in Options whether search suggestions or history suggestions come first in the address bar
  • Activity Stream is faster and now has drag and drop support for top sites
  • Screenshots now has a Copy to Clipboard button and annotations.
  • Off Main Thread Paint (OMTP) (MAC) improves main thread responsiveness
  • Race Cache with Network to improve page loading time

2018-03-05

• Firefox 58.0.2 is our latest security and stability update.
• Firefox 59 is in it's 14th Beta with the first Release Candidate scheduled to ship tomorrow. In the last week we've uplifted about 15 bugs to Firefox 59.
• Firefox 60 is in the Nightly channel and is scheduled to hit release on May 9th. (Previously scheduled for May 8th). Over the last week the Nightly channel has seen 510 fixes including these:
  • A fix for a bug that caused long animated images to consume too much RAM.
  • A change to distrust Symantec certs in Firefox 60.

2018-02-12

• Firefox 58.0.2 is our latest security and stability update which shipped 5 days ago and includes a fix for the Hotmail/Outlook links and scrolling issue.
• Firefox 59 is in its 8th Beta. 59 is scheduled to ship to Release users on March 13th. In the last week we've uplifted about 45 bugs including
  • A fix for a MacOS crash when changing network location
  • A fix for cookies not being set properly
  • A fix for extension context menus on Android.
• Firefox 60 is in the Nightly channel and hits Release on May 8th. Over the last week the Nightly channel has seen about 420 changes including
  • A fix for Windows volume mixer creating a new control for each tab
  • Activity Stream on New Tab Page got a wider layout to support more Top Sites and more content for Stories and Highlights
  • A fix for video "tearing" on Linux in fullscreen mode
  • A new pref to control whether to open address bar results in a new tab
  • The stub installer now downloads over https
  • Support already-enrolled U2F devices with Google Accounts
  • Firefox Screenshots got an update with lots of bug fixes
  • And last but not least, 16 year old XML serialization bug 169521 was fixed.

2018-02-05

• Firefox 58.0.1 is our current shipping release.
• Firefox 59 is in its 6th Beta release. Firefox 59 is scheduled to ship to our Release audience on March 13th. We've taken about 20 uplifts in the last week including
  • A fix for links and text selection in Outlook Web Access
  • An update to the HSTS preload list
  • The bugfix for a Linux font issue
• Firefox 60 is in the Nightly channel and is scheduled to hit Release on May 8th. In the last week the Nightly channel has seen about 430 bugs resolve including these
  • A bug where session restore would sometimes fail to remember tabs
  • Users can now find recently Pocketed items in Highlights on the New Tab Screen
  • Parallel painting was enabled Mac OS
  • HTTP is marked as insecure in Private Browsing mode

2018-01-29

• Firefox 58, featuring faster site loading and improved Screenshots, is in the release channel. We're preparing 58.0.1 security update for release today.
• Firefox 59 is in the Beta channel and is due to ship on March 13th.
  • During the last few days of 59 on Beta, we've had 14 bugs uplifted
• Firefox 60 is in the Nightly channel and is due to ship to release on May 8th
  • Over the last week Nightly has seen over 450 changes and fixes including these notable ones:
    • Firefox now protects the path of HTTP Referer Header when in Private Browsing mode
    • There's now a pref to disable ftp:// in Firefox
    • There's a prototype enterprise policy manager and a few specific enterprise policies implemented.

2018-01-22

• Firefox 58 releases tomorrow, January 23rd, with nearly 5,000 changes including these notable improvements:
  • Firefox on Windows has faster page render speed thanks to Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)
  • Firefox now has faster overall page loading speed with the new JavaScript Start-up Bytecode Cache (JSBC)
  • Faster WebAssembly performance running in the new streaming and tiering compiler
  • Firefox has a more responsive active tab thanks to budget-based background timeout throttling
  • Tabs scrolling with mouse wheel is now very smooth and fast
  • Firefox Screenshots can copy directly to the clipboard and Screenshots now also works in Private Browsing mode
  • The new tab page has faster startup loading, personalized stories, collapsible sections and tippy top rich icons
  • Firefox now supports credit card autofill
  • There are preferences to block specific sites from overriding browser keyboard shortcuts
  • Firefox informs users when an extension has changed the search engine or the new tab page
  • The stub installer got resume download support to mitigate connection failures
  • Firefox now has horizontal Scrolling with Shift+Mouse wheel (a 15 year old bug fixed)
  • There is a Nepali (ne-NP) localized version of Firefox
  • Firefox for Android supports Progressive Web Apps, full screen bookmark management with folders, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback, wicked fast CSS thanks to Stylo, an option to sync only over wifi, and v4 of the Safe Browsing service

2018-01-08

• Firefox 57.0.4 is the current shipping release. A big thank you to the people that made 57.0.3 happen during the holiday break to fix a problem with wrongly collected crash reports and also thanks to the security team and others who shipped 57.0.4 to address the Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks.
• Firefox 58 is in the Beta channel and goes to release on January 23rd.
  • It's been a while since my last update. In the last six weeks or so the Beta branch has seen about 150 fixes including these notable changes.
    • A fix for a Microsoft change to Windows that broke audio in Firefox.
    • A fix for broken window resizing with the Quantum Lights dynamic theme installed.
• Firefox 59 is in the Nightly channel and will be released on March 13th.
  • In the weeks since my last update, Nightly has seen over 1500 changes and fixes including those mentioned for Beta as well as these notable features.
    • Top Sites on the New Tab Page can now be re-ordered by drag and drop.
    • Users can now disable permission prompts globally in Options/Preferences. Tired of all those notification prompts? Now you can disable the features like notifications, camera, microphone, and location completely instead of site by site.
    • Last but not least, another 15 year old bug was struck down with the text selection fix making underscore a part of the word and not punctuation.

2017-11-26

• Firefox 57 has been rolling out for almost two weeks and the press reception has been overwhelmingly positive. One of the most recent reviewers, David Pierce over at Wired, had this to say: "It's better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It's my new go-to browser."
  • The top "expected" challenge of this release, users losing some of their extensions, is well managed with most popular extensions updated to the new API, availability of easy tools for finding alternative extensions, and lots of social support on the Web. (There are now over 7,000 compatible extensions available.)
  • There are several unexpected issues surfacing with Firefox 57 that are being worked on or already resolved. The issue of some users seeing green and purple artifacts on videos had a hotfix roll out and should be clearing up. Some Windows users without screen readers are seeing accessibility related slowdowns/hangs and this is being investigated. Some MacOS users are seeing abnormal battery usage and this is being investigated here. Finally, some users with AMD CPUs and 64-bit Firefox are experiencing frequent crashes which is being tracked here
• Firefox 58 is in our Beta channel and goes to release on January 23rd.
  • Just over 50 fixes were uplifted to Beta in the last week including these notable changes:
    • A fix for a Linux sandbox bug bug where some fonts were displayed as blank.
    • The fix mentioned above for green/purple color distortion during video playback.
    • A change to strictness of OCSP stapling to behave more like other browsers.
    • A preference to enable context menu on mouse up for mouse gestures extension support.
• Firefox 59 is in the Nightly channel and goes to release on March 13th.
  • About 430 issues were resolved as Fixed in the last week including those mentioned above in the Beta notes and these other notable fixes:
    • We've enabled Stylo for Android
    • There's a new pref to display a negative indicator in the URL bar for non-secure sites
    • Support for CSS 'overscroll-behavior' has been added.
    • Extensions can now programmatically register content scripts from a background page.
    • Extensions can now add custom context menus to bookmarks
    • We've got a new autoplay policy for the pref "media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed"

2017-11-13

• Firefox 57 Quantum ships tomorrow!
  • This is our biggest release in years with new features, dramatically improved performance, and a great new look. Mostly, though, it's fast! It's really fast.
• The Firefox 58 Nightly cycle has wrapped up and the next Nightly builds will be 59. 58 hits the Beta channel on Wednesday.
  • In the last week of the 58 Nightly cycle, there were about 525 fixes including this notable change:
    • Users now have a per-site preference to block sites from overriding browser keyboard shortcuts.

2017-11-06

• Firefox 57 Quantum is in the Beta channel. 57 will be released on November 14th, one week from tomorrow.
  • We're on our 14th beta with the first release candidate build coming tomorrow. The pace of change continues to slow with just about 20 changes uplifted from Nightly to Beta in the last week.
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel. It releases January 16th.
  • In the last week, Nightly has had nearly 500 fixes including this notable change:
    • Firefox now informs users if the default search engine was set by an extension. In the preferences, where a user sets default search engine, Firefox shows the user if and which extension has set their search default. It's not uncommon for a user to find Firefox's search defaults changed but not understand why that change happened sometimes blaming Mozilla for overriding user preferences. This change helps that and follows on a change from a month ago that showed users when an extension controls the users's new tab page. We got a notice for extensions controlling the home page about two months ago. These changes are part of a larger effort to expose and explain, in Firefox, how extensions change Firefox.

2017-10-30

• Firefox 57 Quantum is in the Beta channel. It releases November 14th, two weeks from tomorrow.
  • We're on our 12th of 14 betas with Beta 13 coming tomorrow. In the last week we've seen 40 changes uplifted from Nightly to Beta.
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel. 58 will be released on January 16th.
  • In the last week, Nightly has had over 400 fixes:
    • The Awesomebar has been reverted to previous behavior of history first.
    • We now use Visual Studio 2017 as the compiler for official Firefox builds on Windows.

2017-10-23

• Firefox 57 Quantum is in the Beta channel. It releases on November 14, about three weeks away.
  • We're on our 10th Beta with #11 released tomorrow. We have 14 total betas scheduled. In the last week, we've seen about 40 bug fixes uplifted from Nightly to Beta. The pace of change is about half that of last week which was about half that of the week before. As we get even closer to release, the number of changes will continue to drop.
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel. We'll ship it to release users January 16th.
  • In the last week we've fixed more than 500 issues including these notable ones:
    • Browser pop-up panels are now all aligned to the same height on the toolbar.
    • Horizontal Scrolling with Shift+ Mouse wheel is now supported. (a 15 year old request)

2017-10-16

• Firefox 57 Quantum is in the Beta channel. It releases on November 14th, less than a month away.
  • We're on our 8th Beta, out of a scheduled 14. In the last week we've seen about 110 fixes uplifted from Nightly to Beta. The pace of change has slowed considerably as we get closer to release. The kinds of changes that will now be accepted into Beta are for the kinds of bugs that would cause a dot release if unfixed.
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel. It releases January 16th.
  • In the last week, Nightly has seen over 600 changes including these notable fixes: a fix for a long-standing JavaScript timezone bug, a Quantum DOM performance improvement called budget based background timeout throttling has been enabled by default, a problem where you'd lose your YouTube buffer if you moved forward or backward in playback has been fixed, the stub installer now has resume support so if a connection is temporarily lost the installer doesn't have to start over from the beginning, and the `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` setting now defaults to 76 pixels. (You can change this in about:config to suit your preference.)

2017-10-09

• Firefox 57 Quantum is in the Beta channel and ships to Release on November 14th -- that's just about 5 weeks away.
  • We're up to our 5th Beta, out of a scheduled 14 and we've seen over 250 changes on the Beta branch so far. To give you some sense of what's changed, about half of the fixes are to the front end and half to the backend. We've taken over 75 fixes to the main browser UI, 25 fixes for Activity Stream, 35 fixes to Quantum CSS, and we've taken about 30 crash fixes so far. This is quite a lot of change for a Beta so we really appreciate your help testing everything and encourage you to use Firefox 57 Beta as your daily driver.
  • If you'd like to help with specific areas of testing, the Foxfooding program is running for one more week with test plans covering Onboarding, Customization, Extensions, and Activity Stream.
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel and ships to release on January 16th.
  • Since we branched, Nightly has seen nearly 1200 changes landed including support for the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) JavaScript API, off-main-thread paint (OMTP) on Windows, quite a bit of old code removal, some new Web Extension APIs, and a change to the tab width. We're experimenting with some different values for the tab width to determine if we can get more tabs visible before tab scrolling kicks in, while maintaining some readability. You can experiment for yourself by changing the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config. Early indicators are that we're going to settle on something wider than the tabs have been for the last few nighty updates but not as wide as previous releases.

2017-10-02

• Firefox 56 released last Thursday with Firefox Screenshots, an overhauled preferences system, and paused media in background tabs. The press reception has been positive but limited because ...
• Firefox 57 Beta (Quantum) shipped last Tuesday and received volumes of overwhelmingly positive reviews from the press and from users.
  • 57 is currently in its 4th beta build with Beta 5 coming out tomorrow.
  • This week's Beta Foxfooding opportunity is Activity Stream
• Firefox 58 is in the Nightly channel.

2017-09-25

• Firefox 56 is going to be released to the world this Thursday, September 28th.
  • Firefox 56 features a reorganized preferences window that makes finding the most common preferences much easier and offers a new search feature for those harder to reach preferences. Firefox 56 will pause media in background tabs so that video won't start playing until you switch to its tab. Firefox 56 includes some early Quantum Flow work so things should feel really snappy too.
• Firefox 57 moves to Beta tomorrow, September 26th.
  • This is the big release with new features, dramatically improved performance, and a great new look. Mostly, though, it's fast! It's really fast. It even looks fast.
  • We know Firefox 57 is fast because the benchmarks tell us and now we need to know if it's also stable and works like it's supposed to. In support of that effort, this week the Firefox 57 Foxfooding testing program is looking at toolbar customization. We've overhauled the entire customization process making it really easy to change up your toolbars and you can help make sure it works by volunteering this week to run some simple test cases. The Foxfooding program will transition to testing Beta builds tomorrow. If you have any questions about this, you can find me in #foxfooding on IRC and Slack.

2017-09-18

• Firefox 56 is our current Beta version. It will be released on September 28.
• Firefox 57 hits the release channel on November 14th.
  • With about a week left before 57 becomes Beta, feature work is pretty much wrapped up and the major efforts have moved to stabilization and regression finding and fixing.
  • Thanks again for all your help testing Nightly these many weeks. And thank you to everyone that spent some time doing focused testing of the Onboarding experience last week. This week's Firefox 57 Foxfooding area is extensions. The entire extension system has been overhauled with a brand new set of APIs and thousands of updated or new extensions available at addons.mozilla.org. This is an area that should be fun to test and it's extremely important for the 57 release that these basic parts of the extension system work really well. As with last week, I'm available to help in #foxfooding on IRC and Slack.

2017-09-11

• Firefox 56 continues in Beta for a couple more weeks and will be released on September 26th.
• That means that Firefox 57 has about two weeks left in Nightly. Thank you all for being Nightly users these many weeks. You've helped us find and fix significant issues all through the tumultuous Nightly cycle. Now that most of the 57 feature work is complete, I want to introduce you all to another way you can help ensure that Firefox 57 rocks, an easy feature testing program called Foxfooding. This is your opportunity to run some quick and easy formal tests to help us ensure that our newest and highest profile features are functioning as expected. This week's testing area is the all new Onboarding feature. Each week we'll have a new area to test and we'll continue this to the end of the Beta cycle. If you need help or just want to learn more, you can find me in #foxfooding on IRC or Slack.

2017-08-28

• Firefox 56 is in Beta and will be released on September 26th. The major feature that you can help us test is searching in the new preferences organization. Also, if you're one of the lucky 10% who have the new Activity Stream-powered New Tab page in beta, please try to break it and report any bugs you find.
• Firefox 57 is in Nightly and will be released on November 14th. All Nightly users should see the new Activity Stream-powered New Tab page and are encouraged to test drive its features. For each Top Site, you should be able to pin to or remove from Top Sites, open in a new window or new private window, and remove the item completely from your history. All Nightly users should also have the nearly complete Photon UI which you all are encouraged to customize through the Customize menu where you can add or remove buttons, and rearrange them across the toolbars. Finally, you can help us test the three themes, default, light and dark, and the three densities, default, touch, and compact. These are also accessed from the Customize menu.
• If you find bugs and need help reporting them, I'm almost always available on #nightly on IRC and #nightly-newbies on Slack. Also, new throbber!

2017-08-21

• Firefox 56 is our current Beta version. It will be released on September 26.
  • If you're using Beta, the features that need your testing are the reorganized preferences and searching preferences, paused auto-play in background tabs, and out of process web extensions on Windows. If you haven't yet, please poke around these features and help us make sure they're working as expected before we ship them to hundreds of millions of users.
• Nightly is Firefox 57 which will be release on November 14th. That's about 12 weeks away.
  • For those of you all using Nightly, we could use your eyes all across the new Photon UI, the new application menu and all its panels, Customization options including the new toolbar overflow menu, the three built in themes and the three UI densities, the page action menu and addressbar customization, the various sidebars, the Library button and panels, and the Activity Stream powered New Tab Page are some good areas to test. The more of you who put these new pieces of UI through their paces, the more likely we'll find all the bugs and be able to fix them before we ship.

2017-08-14

• Firefox 56, currently in Beta, will be released on September 26th.
  • Major features coming in Firefox 56 include Preferences searching in an all new Preferences organization, paused auto-play in background tabs, out of process web extensions on Windows, Quantum features and fixes, and a smaller and more secure update download.
• Firefox 57, currently in Nightly ships to release on November 14th.
  • The major front end changes in 57 are the Photon UI refresh and Activity Stream. You can see progress on both in the latest nightly builds. Other changes coming to 57 include performance enhancing Quantum features and bug fixes, and the sun-setting of legacy extensions.

2017-08-07

• Firefox 55 ships to release tomorrow!
  • Firefox Screenshots is the major front end feature shipping in Firefox 55. It's going to be a gradual roll-out so not everyone will see it on release day.
  • WebVR is the big platform feature shipping in Firefox 55. Firefox users with an HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift can experience VR content on the Web.
  • Other Firefox 55 features include a dramatic performance improvement in session restore with large numbers of tabs, an option to fine-tune browser performance with e10s multi settings, a click to activate Flash Player, search suggestions in the Awesomebar enabled by default, a modernized update system, and a streamlined Windows stub installer that installs Firefox 64 bit by default for users on 64 bit systems.
• Firefox 56 ships to release on September 26th.
  • Major features coming in Firefox 56 include searching in an all new Preferences organization, paused auto-play in background tabs, out of process web extensions, Quantum features and fixes, and a smaller and more secure update download.
• Firefox 57 ships to release on November 14th. This is the big one.
  • The major front end change in 57 is the Photon UI refresh. You can see Photon progress in the latest nightly builds. Other changes coming to 57 include performance enhancing Quantum features and bug fixes, and the sun-setting of legacy extensions.

2017-07-31

• Firefox 55, now in Beta, ships to release on August 8th, a week from tomorrow.
  • Firefox Screenshots is the major front end feature shipping with 55. It's going to be a gradual roll-out so not everyone will see it on release day. Firefox Screenshots lets you take, save, and share screenshots without leaving Firefox. With Firefox Screenshots, you can easily capture an element on screen, an arbitrary region, the visible page, or the complete page including parts scrolled off screen.
  • WebVR is the major platform feature shipping in Firefox 55. Firefox users with an HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift headset will be able to experience VR content on the Web and can explore some exciting demos at vrlist.io.
• Firefox 56, now in Nightly, ships to release on September 26.
  • Major features coming in Firefox 56 include a new Preferences organization with searching, out of process extensions on Windows, and a new New Tab page powered by Activity Stream.

2017-07-24

• Firefox 55, now in Beta, ships to Release on August 8th -- just about two weeks away.
  • Firefox Screenshots is active for 20% of Beta users and will be gradually rolled out to Release users to ensure our servers and processes are keeping up.
  • Firefox 55 also includes a streamlined Installer that ensures 64-bit Firefox gets delivered to 64-bit Windows users. Also in 55 are Web VR, Search Suggestions enabled by default in the Awesomebar, Ask to Activate Flash, and blazing fast Session Restore. (Check out Dietrich's post on Session Restore for the many tabs use case.)
• Firefox 56, now in Nightly, ships to Release on September 26.
  • While there are a lot of changes happening on Nightly during the 56 cycle, many of them are part of the Photon interface update and those won't ship in 56 -- we're holding them for the big 57 release. Features that we believe will ride the trains to Release are the new Preferences reorganization including Preference Searching and migrating 64-bit capable Windows users to a 64-bit Firefox.
  • Other changes in Nightly that are worth your attention are out of process extensions for Windows users and a new New Tab Page powered by Activity Stream.

2017-07-10

• Firefox 54.0.1 is our currently released version. The dot release was primarily to fix Netflix for Linux Firefox users.
• Firefox 55, now in beta, ships to release on August 8th.
  • The major front end feature of 55 is Firefox Screenshots. Screenshots will be gradually rolled out so not all users will see it on the day 55 ships. This is because we need to gauge usage and ensure our servers and processes are keeping up. Right now, Screenshots are enabled for 10% of Beta users.
  • Other Firefox 55 front end features include a radically streamlined stub installer that makes installing Firefox a breeze and ensures 64-bit Windows users get a 64-bit Firefox. We also have search suggestions in the Awesomebar enabled by default for ease of use, ask to activate Flash for security and performance improvements, and session restore performance improvements that make restoring lots of tabs blazing fast.
  • The major web platform feature for Firefox 55 is WebVR.
• Firefox 56, now in nightly, ships to release on September 26.
  • The major front end changes in 56 are for the Photon UI in preparation for Firefox 57. Most of these Photon features will *not* ship in 56 though you can test them there now.
  • Other nightly features include a new preferences organization, search in preferences, small tiles on the New Tab Page in preparation for Activity Stream, form auto-fill, background tab throttling, paused media in background tabs, on-boarding tours, web extensions in their own process, and migration of 64-bit capable users to 64-bit Firefox.

2017-06-19

• Firefox 54 with E10S multi shipped last week and users are impressed.
  • "@firefox as someone who previously switched to Chrome, I'm glad to be back for the only modern independent browser on earth :) #firefox54"
  • "I am really impressed with the latest Firefox beta. Fast, multiprocess and taking less memory than Chrome, for about the same performance."
  • "If you use #Firefox as a web browser, you should update to version 54 just out today. The speed & memory usage improvements are amazing."
  • "@firefox The new version is incredibly smooth, fast, and sexy. Congrats for this amazing achievement!
• Firefox 55, now in beta, ships to release on August 8th
  • The major front end feature of 55 is Firefox Screenshots. Also in 55 are a refreshed updater experience, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, ask to activate Flash, the new form autofill, a performance preference section for tuning e10s and hardware acceleration, super-fast session restore with lots of tabs, a streamlined Windows installer, improved printing from Reader Mode, and WebVR.
• Firefox 56, now in Nightly, ships to release on September 26th
  • In Firefox 56 nightly, but not going to release until 57, you can see the beginning of the Photon UI. I've got a few slides to show you some of that work. Photon Slides

2017-06-12

• Firefox 54, currently in beta, releases tomorrow, June 13th.
  • The major feature shipping in 54 is E10S-multi with 4 content processes for improved responsiveness and reliability.
• Firefox 55, currently in nightly, goes to release on August 8th.
  • Major new features and changes in nightly include Firefox Screenshots, a refreshed updater experience, an updated preferences organization, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, ask to activate Flash, the new form autofill, a performance preference section for tuning e10s and hardware acceleration, super-fast session restore with lots of tabs, a streamlined Windows installer, improved printing from Reader Mode, WebVR, and significant pieces of the Photon UI have landed. Finally, all locales are now available on nightly.

2017-05-22

• Firefox 54 goes to release on June 13th.
  • With Firefox Screenshots slipping to Firefox 55, what we have now in 54 is an upgraded sandbox, E10S-multi with 4 content processes, a downloads panel and badging redesign, and a whole gang of new WebExtension APIs including a Sidebar API, Proxy API, Privacy API, DevTools Panel API, and Protocol Handler API.
• Firefox 55 goes to release on August 8th.
  • Major new features planned for Firefox 55 include Firefox Screenshots, a refreshed updater experience, an updated preferences organization, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, and ask to activate Flash.

2017-05-15

• Firefox 54 release is about a month away, June 13th.
  • Last week, and for several weeks I've been highlighting Firefox Screenshots as a 54 feature. That's changed and Screenshots is now targeted at Firefox 55. Still on track for 54 is E10S-muli with 4 content processes for improved reliability and responsiveness.
• Firefox 55, now in Nightly, moves to Beta on June 13th and then to release on August 8th.
  • Major new features in Firefox 55 include Firefox Screenshots, a refreshed updater UI, an updated preferences organization, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, and Flash click-to-play

2017-05-08

• Firefox 54 release is in about 5 weeks.
  • The Major front-end feature coming with 54 is Firefox Screenshots. Screenshots will be a gradual roll-out so not everyone will get it on day one. We'll be shipping it to a subset of release users, looking at all of our quality measures, and rolling it out more broadly assuming all looks good with the metrics.
  • The major back-end change coming to 54 is E10S-muli with 4 content processes for improved reliability and responsiveness.

• Firefox 55, now in Nightly, moves to Beta on June 13th and then to release on August 8th.
  • Major new features in Firefox 55 include a refreshed updater UI, an updated preferences organization, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, and Flash click-to-play.

2017-05-01

• Firefox 54, now in Beta, ships to release June 13th. If all the testing goes well it will include two exciting new features, Firefox Screenshots and E10S-multi with 4 content processes. Screenshots is preffed off in Beta while the team works out some details around testing. E10S-multi is going through A/B testing in Beta comparing the stability of different numbers of content processes.

• Firefox 55, now in Nightly, ships to release on August 8th. Nightly currently includes a refreshed updater UI that's modernized, less "in your face" than the big dialog, but persistent so hopefully better at keeping users up to date. Nightly also includes a new and simplified, easier to use preferences organization -- including a performance preferences section for controlling e10s multi and hardware acceleration (located at the bottom of the General section). Finally, Nightly now includes a "legacy" badge on XUL/XPCOM add-ons in the Add-ons manager. This is the start of the plan for showing users what add-ons won't make the cut for Firefox 57.

2017-04-24

• Firefox 53 shipped last Wednesday.
• Firefox 54, currently in Beta, is scheduled to ship to release on June 13th.
  • 54 should include Firefox Screenshots, an upgraded sandbox, 4 content processes, downloads panel redesign, a gang of new WebExtension APIs, the ability to create your own custom devices in Responsive Device Mode, and a "Mobile Bookmarks” folder for easier access to bookmarks synced from mobile devices.
• Firefox 55, currently in Nightly, is scheduled to ship to release on August 8th.
  • 55 has a refreshed update UI, a new preferences organization, default to on search suggestions, Flash click to play, geolocation powered by Mozilla Location Service, a performance panel for controlling e10s multi, out of process WebExtensions, localizations, and more.
  • As a reminder, Firefox 55 is staying in nightly for an extra cycle as a consequence of removing the Aurora channel. You can read more about the new release process at http://release.mozilla.org/firefox/release/2017/04/17/Dawn-Project-FAQ.html
• A quick note about these Firefox updates: if you have items you'd like me to announce, new features or changes coming to Firefox, or if you've got questions about the Firefox roadmap that you'd like addressed in a Firefox update, please let me know. I'm looking into whether we can use Moderator for this but in the mean time, you can email me at asa@mozilla.com.

2017-04-17

• Firefox 53 ships on Wednesday, April 19th. That's a one day slip from what I told y'all last week.
  • 53 includes two new themes, a separate compositor process for stability, support for lightweight themes in private browsing mode, estimated reading time in reader mode, a 64-bit choice in the Windows installer, a visual refresh of the media controls, updated privacy and security permission prompts, better readability for page titles in tabs, support for WebM alpha, and a reduced download and update size on Mac.
• Firefox 54 ships on June 13
  • The major front-end addition in 54 is Firefox Screenshots, the feature formerly known as pageshots from Test Pilot.
  • The major back-end change is that our security sandbox has been upgraded (to level 2)
• Firefox 55 ships on August 8
  • The big changes coming to 55 include a refreshed preferences system, a refreshed update UI, default to on search suggestions, one-click search buttons in the Awesomebar, and Flash click-to-play.

• http://release.mozilla.org/firefox/release/2017/04/17/Dawn-Project-FAQ.html

2017-04-10

• Firefox 53 ships next week, on April 18th.
  • The major front end change in Firefox 53 is the inclusion of two alternate themes, Compact Light and Compact Dark. These "compact" themes offer more space for the web page by shrinking the height of the Firefox toolbars. And as you can guess from the theme names, they come in a light and a dark look.
  • The most significant back end change is the addition of a compositor (GPU) process which reduces overall crashes by 4% and makes recovering from GPU crashes mostly seamless to the user.
  • Other changes in 53 include an option in the Firefox for Windows Installer to pick a 64-bit build, a visual refresh of the media controls, updated privacy and security permission prompts, estimated reading time added to Reader Mode, a dramatically reduced download and update size for Mac builds, better readability of page titles in tabs, and support for WebM alpha.

2017-03-27

• Firefox 53, now in Beta, ships on April 18th and will include the compact dark and light themes which provide a bit more real estate for content. If you're on Beta, please give these new themes a try and let us know if you find anything not working.
• Firefox 54 ships on June 13th and should include Firefox Screenshots -- that's the new name for the Page Shot feature that debuted in Test Pilot. Firefox Screenshots lets you capture, save, and share screenshots right in the browser.
• Firefox 55 ships on August 8th. Right now it's in nightly and includes e10s multi. We're testing 4 content processes but we've got some bugs to get fixed before this will be uplifted to Aurora/Dev Edition.

2017-03-20

• Firefox 52.0.1 shipped on Friday to fix a security issue that was reported through the Pwn2Own security contest. The fix, in both mainline and ESR, on both Desktop and Mobile, was release less than 24 hours from disclosure.

• Firefox 53, coming up in about a month, includes the light and dark compact themes and a separate compositor process to gracefully recover from GPU crashes. 53 will see AMO policy updated to only accept Web Extensions for new extensions. Updates to classic extensions will still be accepted. And last but not least, 53 will have compact tabs and tab re-ordering on Android.

2017-03-13

• Firefox 53, now in Beta, ships to release on April 18th
  • The most visible change coming to Firefox 53, and available for you to test in Beta, Aurora, and Nightly, is the addition of two new themes. The themes are called "Compact Light" and "Compact Dark" and offer as you'd expect, a light and a dark theme that use less space for the UI giving you more space for content.

• Firefox 54, now in Aurora, ships to release on June 13th
  • 54 should include a level 2 (of 3) sandbox for browsing security. It will also enable E10s for Windows accessibility users. 54 gets a handful of new WebExtension APIs including a sidebar API, custom protocol handlers API, privacy API, DevTools panel API, and about:home/about:newtab overrides. Also in 54 we hope to see the Page Shots feature shipping.

• Firefox 55, now in Nightly, ships to release on August 8th.
  • If all goes well, we'll be enabling e10s multi with four content processes for this release. We'll be shipping a stub installer that will install 64-bit Firefox for users with 64-bit Windows systems. We'll have a new Themeing API. Flash will become click to play. WebExtensions will run in their own process. And, last but definitely not least, we'll launch Activity Stream on desktop.

2017-03-06

• Firefox 52 releases tomorrow, March 7th.
  • 52 includes Captive Portal Detection, insecure password warnings in-form, and send tab/link/page to another device using push. 52 is the vehicle for CSS Grid and Web Assembly, two of the hottest platform features anyone has shipped in a long time. 52 also brings e10s to Windows users with touchscreens, and all extension users except those with extensions labeled as mpc=false. 52 is the release that Vista and XP users will be transitioned to the ESR channel. It's also the release we disable all plug-ins except Flash.

2017-02-27

• Firefox 52 ships to release on March 7th, a week from tomorrow.
  • Visible front end changes include captive portal detection, disabling of all NPAPI plugins except Flash, and an in-content warning when submitting login information over an insecure connection.
  • The major Web platform changes for Firefox 52 are Web Assembly and CSS Grid. Along with the CSS grid platform capabilities, we're also shipping Grid Inspector with the Firefox developer tools.

2017-02-06

• Firefox 52, accompanied by Firefox 52 ESR, will be released in about a month. A major change coming to mainline Firefox 52 is the deprecation the plug-ins API which will disable all plug-ins except Flash. NPAPI Plug-ins will continue to work in the ESR release. Firefox 52 will be the release where Windows XP and Vista users are transferred from mainline Firefox to ESR. The Firefox web platform, on both desktop and mobile, will see the addition of Web Assembly and CSS Grid

• Firefox 53, now in Aurora / Dev Edition, will be shipping to release on April 18th. The major visible change in 53 is the addition of two new "compact" themes. The Dev Edition themes are riding the trains to release! Firefox 53 also marks the end of AMO accepting old-API extensions. From here on out it's all Web Extensions all of the time.

• Check out some of the interesting Firefox news for the last week:
  • New Add-ons Developer Hub
  • Mozilla to drop support for all NPAPI plugins in Firefox 52, except Flash

2017-01-30

• Firefox 51 shipped last Tuesday. Yay! with broken geolocation on Windows. Boo!. 51.0.1 shipped the following day to fix this.
• Firefox Focus 3 shipped last week with changeable search engines, 27 languages, and more. If you haven't given it a try on your iDevice, head over to the App Store and get it today.

• Firefox 52, now in Beta, will be released March 7th. Firefox 52 will include a bunch of great new features like CSS Grid, Web Assembly, captive portal detection, and more users getting multi-process Firefox. 52 will also see Windows XP/Vista transition to the ESR train.

• To learn more about what's going on in Firefox development, I highly recommend these blogs/pages:
  • Firefox Nightly News
  • Mozilla Hacks
  • Firefox Roadmap

• Check out some of the interesting Firefox news for the last week:
  • How Facebook helped tweak Chrome and Firefox to download pages faster
  • Time to make the switch to 64-bit Firefox on Windows
  • Mossberg: What’s up with Firefox, the browser that time forgot?
    • Can Mozilla Save Firefox? (Mossberg's podcast)

2017-01-23

• Firefox 51 ships to release tomorrow, January 24th.
  • Visible front end changes include an insecure password warning in the addressbar on a login pages that do not have a secure connection, a toggle to view passwords from the prompt before saving them, and a zoom level indicator in the addressbar.
  • The major Web platform change for Firefox 51 is WebGL2.
  • On the reliability and responsiveness front, even more users will be getting multi-process Firefox as it's enabled for another large group of extensions and our users in Russia who had seen it disabled because of a top crash.

2017-01-09

• Firefox 51, now in Beta, ships to release on January 24th and will include some nice improvements. First is a feature that will warn users when they're on pages that submit passwords insecurely. Second, WebGL 2! Firefox for android will be shipping various security fixes.

• Firefox 52, now in Dev Edition / Aurora, releases on March 9th and should include captive portal detection, our first OS X sandbox, multi-process enabled for Windows touchscreens, WebAssembly and CSS Grid support! Android Firefox will be seeing improvements to Sync and a 5+mb reduction in APK size. Firefox 52 will also see us transition our Windows XP and Vista users over to our Extended Support Release. Finally, with 52, Firefox will stop supporting all NPAPI plug-ins except Flash.

• Firefox 53, the nightly channel, ships to release on April 18th and will hopefully include a new site permission interface, E10s multi, the compositor process, and an installer update that will help 64-bit windows users get the 64-bit Firefox version.