Firefox/Roadmap/Updates

Here you'll find weekly Firefox browser news and headlines, as shared at Mozilla's Weekly Updates meeting.

2020 Firefox Roadmap/Updates
Latest: 2020-01-13
January	6th, 13th

2020-01-13

• Firefox 72.0.1 is our current stable release. The major release shipped last Tuesday, and delivered fingerprinting script blocking by default for all users, less annoying notification request indication, and picture-in-picture for Mac and Linux users. The major release was followed a day later by a security update for a type confusion bug in our JS engine that was being actively exploited.
• Firefox 73 is in the Beta channel and hits our stable release on February 11th.
• Firefox 74 is in Nightly and saw about 400 bugs resolved as fixed in this first week of the cycle. Here are some of the notable changes landed in the last week:
  • The OS compositor has been enabled for macOS when WebRender is enabled.
  • Firefox now has profile data import for Edgium on Windows and Mac.
  • GeckoView has enable/disable extension support.
  • GeckoView's about:config got a visual update.
  • A couple of pinned tabs regressions, one that caused pinned tabs reordering and one that lost pinned tabs, have been fixed.

2020-01-06

• Firefox 71.0 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 72 is in the Beta channel, as the final release candidate. 72 goes to our stable release channel tomorrow, January 7th.
• Firefox 73 is in the Nightly channel. Today is merge day. As of about an hour ago, the soft freeze has ended and 74 development can begin. Firefox 73 hits our stable release on February 11th. Over the last three weeks there have been about 650 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable changes:
  • Global default zoom has landed. This allows users to set a default zoom level for all pages.
  • The tab overflow menu, which used to only appear when you had more tabs than fit in the tab strip, can now be made permanent with the about:config flag browser.tabs.tabmanager.enabled In this configuration, it's called the Tab Manager.
  • In Dev Tools, the "Omniscient Browser Toolbox" has been enabled by default. This should allow you to inspect and debug any resource of Firefox, no matter in which thread or process this resource is.
  • Several Accounts Menu items have been renamed to increase clarity.
  • about:crashes now has a "submit all crashes" button.
  • Firefox now has a High Contrast Mode for GTK.
  • Media control key event on OSX has been enabled on Nightly.
  • Firefox now has NextDNS as optional TRR provider (DNS over HTTPS.)

2019-12-16

• Firefox 71.0 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 72 is in the Beta channel. Beta 7, 8, and 9 go out today, Wednesday, and Friday. 72 hits our stable channel on January 7th.
• Firefox 73 is in the Nightly channel. 73 will hit our stable channel on February 11th. Over the last week, there have been about 380 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable changes:
  • The Contextual Identity indicator has been moved up the tab so it' still visible with the addressbar's new expanded area.
  • WebRender has been enabled for Adreno 5xx and 6xx Android systems in Nightly.
  • A significant fix the High Contrast Mode's readability backplate landed which should allow it to ride the trains.
  • Find no longer fails when you enter text with diacritics or accented characters.

2019-12-09

• Firefox 71.0 is our current stable release. This release shipped last Tuesday and includes picture in picture support on Windows and CSS sub-grid in Gecko.
• Firefox 72 is in the Beta channel. Beta 4, 5, and 6 go out today, Wednesday, and Friday. 72 hits our stable channel on January 7th.
• Firefox 73 is in the Nightly channel. 73 will hit our stable channel on February 11th. Over the last week, there have been about 370 bugs resolved as Fixed including these notable changes:
  • The URLbar redesign has been re-enabled on Nightly.
  • Gecko now has support for CSS3 text module text-underline-position.
  • Firefox no longer sets the User-Agent header for DoH requests.
  • The OS compositor has been enabled by default on Windows.
  • Picture-in-Picture window will now resize when the video changes dimensions.
  • Picture-in-Picture now has an audio toggle.
  • WebExtension install/uninstall has been implemented for GeckoView.

2019-12-02

• Firefox 70.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 71 in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release tomorrow, December 3rd.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel. Today is merge day. Over the last week there have been about 320 bug fixes landed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • An accessibility regression in the Bookmarks Manager related to de-XULing Firefox was fixed (and uplifted in time for 71).
  • The Add-ons Recommendation page is now accessible thanks to fixes at bug 1593649
  • WebRender is now enabled for NVIDIA laptops with small screens.
  • WebRender is also enabled for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL on nightly.
  • A bug causing Firefox to open multiple tabs when set as default mail client was fixed.
  • SharedArrayBuffer has been enabled on Nightly.
  • Initial link rel="preload", behind the about:config flag network.preload-experimental, and only supporting "script" and "styles" types, has landed on Nightly.

2019-11-25

• Firefox 70.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 71 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release next Tuesday, December 3rd. We're building the release candidate today so, unless something unexpected surfaces, we're nearly wrapped on this one.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on January 7th. This friday, November 29th, is string freeze for Firefox 72 and next week the 72 Betas begin. Over the last week there have been about 370 fixes landed in Nightly including these notable ones:
  • A Linux-only regression where Nightly would open but when clicked on did not respond was fixed.
  • Picture-in-picture has been readied to ride the trains for Mac and Linux.
  • Fingerprint blocking has been turned on within the Standard ETP settings.
  • Firefox now surfaces enable/disable button on theme cards and from the meatball menu in the Add-ons Manager.
  • We now require a user gesture for getDisplayMedia().
  • Remote settings blocklist has been enabled.
  • GeckoView now has support for the pageAction extension API.
  • The Remote Data Decoder (RDD) has been enabled for vorbis, wav, and opus on Windows.
  • Gecko now supports the individual transform properties: translate, rotate, and scale.
  • Gecko now supports 'Motion paths', which allow authors to animate elements along an author-specified path.
  • In Gecko, the letter-spacing and word-spacing CSS properties now work on SVG text.

2019-11-18

• Firefox 70.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 71 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release on December 3rd. Our final Betas, 11 and 12, go out this week.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on January 7th. Over the last week there have been about 400 fixes landed in Nightly including these notable ones:
  • Firefox now offers an Ad Privacy Info dialog for sponsored Top Sites tiles.
  • Firefox now has personalized sponsored content on the New Tab Page.
  • There's a new drag and drop indicator for the Bookmarks Toolbar and the tab strip.
  • For improved performance and memory usage, we've replaced libhyphen with a new library that supports sharing hyphenation data across processes.
  • Firefox now registers itself as a webp handler.
  • Firefox dropped support for HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) because of the low adoption rate and interoperability risk.
  • A regression causing badging on extension toolbar buttons to obscure the button has been fixed.

2019-11-11

• Firefox 70.0.1 is our current stable release. There are currently no drivers for a 70.0.2.
• Firefox 71 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release on December 3rd. Betas 9 and 10 (of 12) go out this week.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on January 7th. Over the last week there have been about 440 fixes landed in Nightly including these notable ones:
  • The celebration section of the protections panel didn't highlight properly on keyboard focus. That's now fixed.
  • The "megabar" now behind an about:config pref, has improved selection highlighting. The font weight of the page title and address is now heavier. The megabar also received a change to spacing between results. To see the changes, go to about:config and enable the megabar by setting browser.urlbar.megabar to true.
  • The Pocket proxy server is now open source. The proxy service sits between Firefox and the Adzerk ad server. Its purpose is to preserve the privacy of Firefox clients when they request sponsored content for the Firefox New Tab.
  • A bug was fixed that allowed malicious sites to use auth prompts steal focus and make it difficult to close the website or browser.
• As we do every two weeks, last Tuesday the Firefox team met and discussed a wide range of Firefox changes that happened over the previous two weeks. You can read the "These Weeks in Firefox" blog posts which summarize these Firefox meetings at Firefox Nightly News and the raw meeting notes for the latest meeting are available in this document. I'd like to highlight several items from this latest Firefox meeting that weren't previously mentioned in my Firefox Weekly Update:
  • Support for Fission in DevTools started with enabling the Browser Toolbox to inspect/debug multiple processes. This work is happening behind the pref devtools.browsertoolbox.fission. This new "Omniscient" Browser Toolbox will be enabled by default once the dependencies of bug 1588050 are resolved.
  • Also in DevTools, the Debugger’s new Watchpoints feature, which lets you pause on an object property get/set, is on by default in Nightly and Dev Edition.
  • There’s a new Track IPC feature (off by default) that can be enabled from the Firefox Profiler’s capture panel to track async IPC.
  • For a perf boost, we no longer animate restored windows from the last session.
  • We launched a couple of “Relationship” CFRs in Nightly and Beta channels that recommends Firefox Send and and recommends Send Tab when viewing an article or a recipes website.

2019-11-04

• Firefox 70.0.1 is our current stable release. The dot release was driven by a need to fix a localstorage bug causing some sites or page elemets to fail to load.
• Firefox 71 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release on December 3rd. Beta 7 and Beta 8 go out this Tuesday and Friday. There are only 12 betas scheduled for this cycle. Over the last week, we've seen nearly 70 fixes uplifted to the Beta channel.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel and ships to our stable release on January 7th. Over the last week there have been about 400 fixes landed in Nighlty including these notable ones:
  • Behind the about:config pref network.http.http3.enabled HTTP/3 has landed in Nightly Firefox.
  • After warnings, the Scratchpad has been removed from Dev Tools.
  • GeckoView got WebShare support.
  • Users now have a button to opt out of feature promotions.
  • The "megabar" has been temporarily disabled on Nightly.
  • Zoom and fullscreen buttons in the hamburger menu have accessible labels.

2019-10-28

• Firefox 70 is our current stable release. Firefox 70 shipped last Tuesday, October 22nd. 70 users are enjoying the new Privacy Protections report, the new password manager called Firefox Lockwise, reduced power consumption on macOS, and in Developer Tools an audit for keyboard accessibility, a color deficiency simulator for systems with WebRender enabled, and an inactive CSS indicator with tooltips explaining why the CSS isn't used.
• Firefox 71 is in the Beta channel and ships to our stable release on December 3rd.
• Firefox 72 is in the Nightly channel. Over the last week Nightly has seen approximately 400 fixes including these notable one:
  • A couple of macOS 10.15 Catalina regression fixes:
    • "Use keyboard navigation" in system preferences works again.
    • The OpenH264 plug-in works again.
  • CFR appearance is now announced to screen reader users.
  • Private Browsing's separate search engine has been enabled on Nightly.
  • Browser support information is now shown in Dev Tools.
  • Dev Tools inspector now has a color scheme simulator.
  • The "No Logins" screen offers importing logins from another browser on supported OSes.
  • There is now a search icon in front of the address bar.
  • Picture in picture has been enabled for Mac and Linux in Nightly.
  • Gecko now supports an online speech recognition service for the Web Speech API.

2019-10-21

• Firefox 69.0.3 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 70 is in the Beta channel as a Release Candidate and ships to our stable release audience tomorrow, October 22nd. Our Firefox 70 users will enjoy the new Privacy Protections report, Firefox Lockwise, the new password management tool, macOS that reduce power consumption reductions, and in Developer Tools an audit for keyboard accessibility, a color deficiency simulator for systems with WebRender enabled, and an inactive CSS indicator with tooltips explaining why the CSS isn't used.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and is uplifting to Beta today. Over the final week of Nightly 71 development, we've seen about 500 fixes including these notable ones:
  • Reader View availability is announced to screen readers.
  • The Protections Panel and a toast notification will celebrate milestones when certain numbers of tracker are blocked.
  • The awesomebar/megabar got some improvements including less padding of results, not overlapping toolbar buttons, and not overlapping other toolbars.

2019-10-14

• Firefox 69.0.3 is our current stable release. This dot release shipped on October 10th to fix a pair of regressions.
• Firefox 70 is in the Beta channel with the first release candidate build happening today. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd, a week from tomorrow.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel. Today marks the beginning of the soft code freeze and string freeze is this Friday. Over the last week there have been about 400 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones:
  • A couple of visible regressions were fixed:
    • The tab bar appearance was broken in High Contrast Mode with WebRender enabled.
    • Creating profiles in about:profiles was broken.
  • A separate search engine setting is now available for Private Browsing windows. You can change your Private Browsing search service in the Search section of the Options/Preferences window.
  • Launching a Private Browsing search is now available from the context menu. You can select some text in a web page and, using the context menu, send it to a Private Browsing search.
  • The Contextual Feature Recommender is now keyboard accessible. Previously, keyboard users had to press f6 several times to get to the CFR doorhanger.
  • Page up and down scrolling now takes into account position sticky content like it has for position fixed. When a page has a fixed or sticky header, navigating with page up and down takes that into account so your text doesn't get obscured by the fixed/sticky element.
  • The Mac TouchBar now offers search shortcuts when the addressbar is focused. For users with a TouchBar Macbook Pro, searching history, bookmarks, open tabs, etc. just because a whole lot easier.
  • E10S Service Workers have been enabled for Nightly.
  • Gecko now has a DOM implementation of the Web Share API.

2019-10-07

• Firefox 69.0.2 is our current stable release. This version was released on October 3rd and fixed a crash when editing files on Office 365 websites (bug 1579858) and fixed detection of the Windows 10 Parental Controls feature being enabled (bug 1584613).
• Firefox 70 is in the Beta channel with Beta 13 going out tomorrow and Beta 14 going out Friday. These are our final two betas before the release candidate. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 380 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones:
  • First, and most obvious to anyone that's been using Nightly this last week, the Megabar pref has been enabled so you'll be seeing the new addressbar implementation which expands when you click in it.
  • Behind the about:config pref browser.search.separatePrivateDefault.ui.enabled Firefox now has preferences UI to set a distinct search engine for private browsing windows.
  • Speaking of about:config, you can now double-click about:config listings to edit their state.
  • Firefox now has a command line option to start in a kiosk mode.
  • A short-lived regression which caused light and dark areas in preferences and add-ons manager was fixed.
  • A readability backplate for high contrast mode was implemented allowing Firefox to show background images while preserving readability.
  • GeckoView got the capability to force enable zooming which should show up in Fenix soon.
  • A bug causing autofill results to be be read twice by screen readers was fixed.
  • Sponsored Content on the New Tab Page now has a "Our sponsors & your privacy" context menu item that displays a modal dialog explaining the privacy of sponsored content.
  • The browser storage for HTML5 Application Cache (AppCache), deprecated since Firefox 44, is no longer available in the Nightly and early Beta/DevEdition channels.

2019-09-30

• Firefox 69.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 70 is in the Beta channel with Beta 11 going out tomorrow and Beta 12 going out Friday. There are 14 betas scheduled for this cycle. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 375 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones:
  • One-off search buttons in the awesomebar display better in narrow windows.
  • Soon to be deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have been disabled in Nightly.
  • Synced Tabs sidebar can now be accessed from the Firefox Accounts menu on the main toolbar.
  • Firefox again supports a more significant increase in font size in reader mode.
  • Several Linux picture-in-picture issues have been resolved.

2019-09-23

• On this day, 17 years ago, Phoenix 0.1 was released. This marked the first public availability of the browser that would come to be known as Firefox.
• Firefox 69.0.1 is our current stable release. The dot release shipped last week on September 18th with several bug fixes including one to make the Add-ons Manger accessible to screen reader users.
• Firefox 70 is in the Beta channel with Beta 9 going out tomorrow and Beta 10 going out Friday. There are 14 betas scheduled for this cycle. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 400 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones.
  • The CSS column-span property has been enabled on Nightly.
  • Firefox can now import logins from Chrome on macOS.
  • Firefox supports hardware media keys to control media on macOS.
  • The Protection Report now has a pretty animation for the main protections chart.
  • The Firefox Accounts menu on the main toolbar now has an accounts sub-menu.
  • The Logins Manager now allows for searching by password.

2019-09-16

• Firefox 69.0 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 70 is now in Beta with Beta 75 going out tomorrow and Beta 8 going out Friday. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 375 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones.
  • The JavaScript Debugger has a keyboard shortcut (again). Cmd-Opt-L or Ctrl-Shift-L
  • Monitor breach alearts are now accessible in the new Logins Manger.
  • In the Add-ons Manager, scroll position is now remembered when switching views.
  • A handful of Picture-in-picture bugs got fixes.

2019-09-09

• Firefox 69.0 is our current stable release. The release shipped last Tuesday and since then Firefox users have been enjoying Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) enabled by default, block auto-play that can block all videos from autoplaying, not just those with sound.
• Firefox 70 is now in Beta with Beta 5 going out tomorrow and Beta 6 going out Friday. Firefox 70 ships to our stable release audience on October 22nd.
• Firefox 71 is in the Nightly channel and over the last week there have been about 350 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable ones.
  • GeckoView, our mobile browser engine on Android, now has Web Push support.
  • Picture-in-picture got a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+].
  • You can now search in the Dev Tools Network Monitor.
  • The Dev Tools Accessibility keyboard audit now recognizes and warns on mouse-only interactions.
  • Color contrast calculations now work with color blindness simulations in Dev Tools.
  • The first part of a "shareable protection report" landed in Firefox.

2019-09-02

• Firefox 68.0.2 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 69 is complete and ships to the stable release tomorrow, September 3rd.
• Firefox 70 in now in Beta. It ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Over its last week on mozilla-central, Firefox 70 got another 450 or so bug fixes including these notable changes:
  • Keyboard users can now navigate between toolbar buttons by typing the first letter or two of the button's name.
  • Fingerprinting protection has moved to the Standard mode of content blocking.
  • DevTools new Event Listener Breakpoints let you debug which code a page executes in response to browser events. You can pick specific types, such as click or keydown, or whole categories of events, like all mouse input.
  • DevTools' new DOM Breakpoints let you diagnose when code in a page changes a specific DOM node, including the node's children.
  • The DevTools Accessibility panel now has keyboard accessibility audits.
  • The DevTools Accessibility panel now has color blindness simulation functionality.

2019-08-26

• Firefox 68.0.2 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 69 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. The Release Candidate is happening today so we're pretty much done with 69.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Nightly soft code freeze starts today. Developers are strongly urged not to land any fixes that are deemed risky and not to enable (pref-controlled) features. It's recommended to wait until after Merge day next week to land such fixes on mozilla-central. Over the last week, there have been about 450 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable changes:
  • Last week Firefox got the ability to inspect WebExtension storage.local data from the "Addon Debugging" toolbox Storage panel (a feature request tracked by a 3+ years old meta bug!!!). The feature is currently locked behind the devtools.storage.extensionStorage.enabled pref, we invite you to give the feature a try in a recent Nighty build by flipping the pref and provide us your feedback. Follow Bug 1542035 to know when the feature will be enabled by default and when some additional features will be added to it (like the ability to apply changes to the storage.local data from the DevTools Storage panel).
  • A regression we shipped in Firefox 68 has been fixed and the extensions list in the add-ons manager is again screen reader accessible.
  • The notifications prompt now has a "never allow" rather than a "not now" denial button.
  • Firefox now has prefsUI for the picture-in-picture toggle.
  • The new certificate viewer has been enabled by default.
  • Developer Tools' Scratchpad got a deprecation warning.
  • CoreAnimation has been enabled by default for macOS users.

2019-08-19

• Firefox 68.0.2 is our current stable release. This dot release shipped on August 14 and addresses several minor regressions and one security issue.
• Firefox 69 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Beta 15 and 16 go out this Tuesday and Friday.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Nightly soft freeze is one week from today. Over the last week there have been about 450 bugs fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • On macOS, we've got the beginning of work, preffed off still, to improve Firefox battery life by using CoreAnimation.
  • Last week we saw the introduction of two new certificate-related prefs in Firefox. This week they've been flipped to on by default. EV certificate information has been moved out of the addressbar and the lock icon is now gray rather than green. You can see old and new look here: Media:Ev-before-after.png
  • Behind the browser.urlbar.megabar pref, the Firefox addressbar pop-up is anchored to the input rather than the toolbar. You can see the old and new look here: Media:Megabar.png
  • The Firefox Logins Manager now has a footer recommending Lockwise mobile apps. You can see the banner here: Media:Lockwise-promo.png
  • There's a blue dot on the shield icon in the Firefox addressbar when ETP has been disabled for a site. It looks like this: Media:Disable-tracking-dot.png
  • There's a blue dot on the Firefox lock icon when a user has granted the site permissions. It looks like this: Media:Permissions-dot.png
  • The bar chart and legend in the Firefox Protections Report are now screen reader accessible.
  • The Gecko CSS feature backdrop-filter has been implemented for the WebRender backend. It's still behind the layout.css.backdrop-filter.enabled pref.
  • The Gecko CSS feature text-decoration-skip-ink is now enabled by default.
  • The Gecko CSS feature text-decoration-thickness is now enabled by default.
  • The Gecko CSS feature text-underline-offset is now enabled by default.

2019-08-12

• Firefox 68.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 69 is in Beta and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week, about 15 bugfixes have been uplifted to Beta. Beta 13 (of 16 scheduled) ships tomorrow and Beta 14 goes out Friday.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Over the last week there have been about 420 bugs fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • Behind an about:config pref, Gecko now supports text-decoration-skip-ink. The text-decoration-skip-ink CSS property specifies how overlines and underlines are drawn when they pass over glyph ascenders and descenders. You can see an example here: Media:Skip-ink.png The about:config pref is layout.css.text-decoration-skip-ink.enabled
  • Firefox's content blocking panel has been split into two sections, blocking and not blocking and now shows a banner explaining ETP right in the Protection panel. Here's what that looks like: Media:Protections-panel.png
  • Social Tracking Protection has been enabled in Firefox. Social trackers are now blocked as part of the Standard protections and the Tracking Protection preferences panel has been updated. It now looks like this: Media:Tracking-preferences.png
  • In preparation for moving the EV indication from the addressbar to the identity panel, we've got two new about:config prefs, one for showing a normal lock icon for EV secured sites and one for making the lock icon gray. You can see the prefs in action here: Media:Security-indicator-prefs.png The prefs are security.identityblock.show_extended_validation and security.secure_connection_icon_color_gray
  • Breach Alerts have been enabled for the new logins manager and the logins manager has a sort by breached websites option. Also, the new logins manager now shows favicons next to each login instead of the default globe icon.
  • Last but not least, all three channels for Firefox got updated logos. Here's the new about screen for Nightly: Media:Nightly-about-new-log0.png

2019-08-05

• Firefox 68.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 69 is in Beta and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week, about 65 bugfixes have been uplifted to Beta. Beta 11 (of 16 scheduled) ships tomorrow and Beta 12 goes out Friday.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. We've got four weeks left in 70 Nightly development and only three weeks until the soft freeze. Over the last week there have been about 400 bugs fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • Firefox now shows an indicator when geolocation is in use.
  • The Protections panel is now keyboard accessible and better matches the design spec.
  • Social tracking protection has begun to land behind preferences. There's a social tracking protection doorhanger that appears the first couple of times that Firefox blocks social trackers and the beginnings of social tracking protection integration with ETP.
  • The new logins manager got some improvements:
    • A "no logins" view for when users encounter the manager and don't yet have any logins.
    • A "sign in to sync" button and message at the top of the window.
    • A breached login alert to warn users of breached accounts.
  • We now have the ability to show a what's new page that's not tied to a major version bump.
  • The Firefox Account toolbar menu is now less sync specific and shows other Firefox account-based services like Monitor and Send.
  • The Privacy Protections item in the Firefox menu now takes users to the Protections report.
  • We made a significant improvement for screen reader performance on dynamic pages by avoiding updates to the accessibility tree when layout reframes don't actually change the semantics on screen.

2019-07-29

• Firefox 68.0.1 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 69 is in Beta and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week, about 55 bugfixes have been uplifted to Beta. Beta 9 (of 16 scheduled) ships tomorrow and Beta 10 goes out Friday.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Over the last week there have been about 400 bugs fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • A regression that caused blurry fonts was fixed.
  • Another regression, one that caused the addressbar dropdown to appear behind the bookmark toolbar, was fixed.
  • Headings in about:memory are now sticky.
  • The new logins manager got a bunch of cleanup fixes.
  • As part of our eviltraps fixing effort, Firefox now exits fullscreen when a permission prompt is shown to the user.
  • The protection report now has dark mode support
  • And we got a new animated shield icon for tracking protection.

2019-07-22

• Firefox 68.0.1 is our current stable release. The point release came out last Thursday, July 18th and fixes several minor regressions.
• Firefox 69 is in Beta and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week, about 50 bugfixes have been uplifted to Beta. Beta 7 (of 16 scheduled) ships tomorrow and Beta 8 goes out Friday.
• Firefox 70 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on October 22nd. Over the last week there have been about 420 bugs fixed in Nightly including these notable changes:
  • The Firefox Dev Tools color picker now shows color contrast information.
  • Mac Firefox now has native fullscreen support behind the preference full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen
  • The site identity "i" icon has been removed and the Protections shield icon is now persistant. The new protections panel is anchored on the persistent shield icon and the identity panel is now anchored on the lock icon.
  • The Firefox Protections Report now shows Monitor content including the number of emails being monitored, the number of data breaches involving those emails, and the number of passwords exposed. It also shows Lockwise information including the number of stored passwords, and the number of synced passwords. Finally, it also shows how many trackers total have been blocked since the feature was enabled.
  • The new logins manager is now on by default. You can access it at about:logins or by clicking the Logins and Passwords item in the Firefox menu.
  • WebRender is enabled for 1920 * 1200 (WUXGA) resolution and below Windows 10 Nvidia laptops.
  • Behind the pref security.aboutcertificate.enabled, showing a certificate now opens the new certificate viewer.

2019-07-15

• Firefox 68 is our current stable release. 68 shipped to our release audience on July 9 and offers users useful new features like optional cryptomining and fingerprinting protection in the browser, a full page color contrast audit in dev tools, and WebAuthn support in Fennec.
• Firefox 69 is in Beta and ships to the stable release on September 3rd.
• Firefox 70 has been in the Nightly channel for one week and in that time there have been about 450 fixes landed including these notable ones:
  • Firefox's in Windows high contrast mode now uses system link colors improving readability greatly.
  • The "What's New" panel has landed behind a pref.
  • The old Content Blocking UI Tour has been removed.
  • Firefox can now suggest securely generated passwords from the context menu and autocomplete (on supported sites)
  • The Protection Report, available at about:protections, now has real data and a Lockwise section.
  • Locally saved browser logins indicate if the login was part of a data breach
  • About performance now shows a graphic, in addition to the severity and number, for the relative energy impacts of tabs
  • ETP Cookie tracking restrictions has been enabled for all GeckoView apps as well as Fennec.
  • The JavaScript Baseline Interpreter has been enabled in Firefox.
  • Content Blocking information now shows up in the Protections Panel which you can see by Alt clicking the site identity area of the address bar.

2019-07-08

• Firefox 67.0.4 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and it ships to the stable release tomorrow, July 9th. Users of the released version of 68 will enjoy cryptomining and fingerprinting protection choices, the “enterprise roots” fix for anti-virus software breaking Firefox connections, WebRender for AMD users, a full page accessibility color contrast audit in Dev Tools, and WebAuthn support in Fennec. It's also worth noting that 68 is an ESR.
• Today is Merge Day and the end of the Nightly soft code freeze as Nightly becomes Firefox 70. Over the last week, developers have fixed about 340 bugs in Nightly 69, including these notables:
  • Firefox now has a what's new button and panel that can be used to let users know what's new in a Firefox update.
  • Firefox now has a native customization window for the macOS Touchbar.

2019-07-01

• Firefox 67.0.4 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel, they're building RC today, and it ships to the stable release on July 9th.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel ans ships to release on September 3rd. Today is the soft code freeze for Nightly. Developers are strongly urged not to land any fixes that are deemed risky or enable (pref-controlled) features a week before Merge day. Over the last week there have been about 400 bugs resolved as Fixed, including these notable ones:
  • It's now clear in about:performance that you can sort columns. The column headers highlight on hover and have a sort order indicator.
  • If an <input> DOES NOT have autocomplete="new-password" we don't offer to generate a strong password in the pop-up. Users should still be able to generate a strong password so Firefox now has a context menu item to fill a password field with a generated password.
  • We fixed update & launch failures on macOS 10.15 due to quarantine changes at bug 1556733
  • The Protection Report at about:protections is coming along with addition of a chart and footer. It's still using dummy data until bug 1557058 is fixed.
  • ESR will get security.enterprise_roots.enabled set to true by default. This enables Firefox to read the Windows or Mac root store.
  • Gecko now supports text-decoration:width which sets the stroke thickness of underlines, overlines, and line-throughs.
  • WebSocket inspection in Dev Tools advances with table and preview sections in WebSocket side panel.
  • We moved cryptomining blocking to the Standard mode of content blocking for Firefox 69.

2019-06-24

• Firefox 67.0.4 is our current stable release. Last week we shipped two security updates, 67.0.3 and 67.0.4, to address an exploit targeting a crypto currency exchange.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel ans ships to release on September 3rd. Over the last week there have been about 460 bugs fixed including these notable ones:
  • The new New Tab experience sees the return of browsing Highlights.
  • Dev Tools get the basic skeleton of web sockets frames inspection panel.
  • The Protection Report is stubbed in.
  • Finder on macOS now displays download progress for files being downloaded.
  • Linux gets kinetic/inertial scrolling.

2019-06-17

• Firefox 67.0.2 is our current stable release. 67.0.2 shipped last Monday and fixes a handful of bugs.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week there have been about 445 bugs fixed including these notable ones:
  • Flash now requires click to activate every time. We have removed "Always Activate" and "Remember this decision" Flash options in Firefox 69.
  • A WebRender bug that caused choppy videos at YouTube has been fixed.
  • Password generation can now be disabled with a checkbox in Options/Preferences.

2019-06-10

• Firefox 67.0.1 is our current stable release. (67.0.2 is due this morning.)
  • This significant set of releases shipped last week and brings the first steps at integrating our Firefox family of products. Firefox now means Enhanced Tracking Protection on by default for new users, an updated Monitor with support for watching multiple emails, an updated Facebook Container which blocks Facebook Likes and Logins from tracking you around the web, and Lockwise -- now available as a synced Firefox extension as well as mobile apps.
  • You can read more about the release at Gizmodo, Engadget, ComputerWorld, c|net, PCMag, PCWorld, TechCrunch, The Verge, Tom's Hardware, USA Today, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Fox News.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th.
  • Firefox 68 includes about:compat, where website-specific workarounds are listed and may be toggled, automatic fix for HTTPS errors caused by antivirus software, WebRender for more platforms, and a full-page color contrast audit in the Developer Tools.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week there have been about 460 bugs fixed including these notable ones:
  • We have enabled retained display list for the parent process. This should bring increased performance to the browser user interface.
  • The new browser protections panel in the address bar now has a toggle for Tracking Protection.
  • The Accessibility section in Developer Tools now has a Text Label accessibility audit.
  • Now that we have more than one audit (contrast and text labels) in the Accessibility Developer Tools, add an "all" filter to a11y panel checks toolbar.
  • about:support now has an install directory listing to make it easier to determine which install is running.

2019-06-03

• Firefox 67.0 is our current stable release.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th. There have been nearly 60 bugfixes uplifted to beta in the last week.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Over the last week there have been about 425 changes landed including these notable ones:
  • Firefox now allows bookmarklets to run even when the CSP on the page would normally block javascript: execution.
  • A short-lived regression, Firefox closing when attempting to close the Find bar was fixed.
  • We have enabled WebRender on nightly for AMD hardware with Linux and Mesa drivers.
  • The GPU process has been enabled on Linux when using hardware compositing.
  • For add-ons that have them, we now show inline preferences on add-on details view.
  • The Firefox Profiler has landed in Nightly. Enable it from the Web developer menu.
  • Firefox now syncs the run studies and make extension recommendations settings.

2019-05-27

• Firefox 67.0 is our current stable release. Firefox 67 users are currently enjoying improvements to Firefox startup and pageload speed, and optional cryptominer and fingerprinter blocking, among the many improvements.
• Firefox 68 is in the Beta channel and ships to the stable release on July 9th. Since Beta opened to 68 development, there have been about 35 bug fixes uplifted from mozilla-central.
• Firefox 69 is in the Nightly channel and ships to the stable release on September 3rd. Since Nightly opened to 69 development, there have been about 500 bugs resolved as fixed including these notable changes:
  • Firefox now hides the picture-in-picture toggle when it doesn't make sense for example very small or very short videos.
  • WebRender is now enabled for low-resolution AMD laptops. Low resolution here means 1920 * 1200 (WUXGA) and below.
  • CSS subgrid has been enabled.
  • Firefox will stop loading userContent.css or userChrome.css by default unless a preference is set The preference is toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
  • A browser tab will indicate that a <video> inside of it is being viewed in Picture-in-Picture.
  • Columns in about:performance are now sortable.
  • Password manager now supports subdomains with the same password.

2019-05-20

• Firefox 66.0.5 is our latest stable release.
• Firefox 67 ships to the stable release tomorrow, May 21st. Firefox 67 brings some great features and fixes including these:
  • Performance improvements including to start-up and pageload.
  • Optional cryptominers and fingerprinter blocking.
  • WebRender enabled for some Windows users.
  • The FIDO U2F API including registrations for Google Accounts.
  • New Pocket New Tab experience for some users.
  • And for Android users, there's a new Firefox Search widget with voice input.
• Today is merge day. Beta will see the continuation of Firefox 68 development and Nightly will see the beginning of Firefox 69 development. Today is also the end of the soft code freeze on Nightly and the floodgates are open for all 69 work. Over the last week there have been 445 bugs resolved as fixed including these fixes of note:
  • Firefox Lockwise (formerly Lockbox) integration has begun. Still behind the about:config pref signon.management.page.enabled and the about page about:logins, the new HTML-based login manager page is starting to take shape.
  • WebRender is enabled for more machines. Now we support Broadwell GT2+.
  • The new about:addons, behind the about:config pref extensions.htmlaboutaddons.enabled, now has a release notes and a permissions section.

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