Side note: I absolutely love the format that Firefox does their release notes in. They're organized really well and do a good job of speaking with the right language for the audience of each change.<p>I can't think of another product that does release notes as well as them. Usually your hunting down ticket numbers (often on a private tracker) that are referenced from a changelog.
Firefox continues its commitment to privacy with this quiet change found in the developer notes [0]:<p>> For privacy reasons, both BatteryManager.chargingTime and BatteryManager.dischargingTime now round the returned value to the closest 15 minutes (bug 1292655).<p>See [1] for an explanation of how the battery status API can be used to track you.<p>[0] <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/51#Changes_for_Web_developers" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/51#Chan...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.hackread.com/smartphone-laptop-battery-invading-privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackread.com/smartphone-laptop-battery-invading-...</a>
This will be the first software that I use everyday (and that I know of) that speaks my native tongue: Kabyle. It might not mean much to the rest of the world, especially since we're not that many native speakers, but I'm loving the fact that they've added it.
This release seems to help on the UX side of things regarding logins, along with improved efficiency.<p>Some of the highlights:<p>* Users can view passwords in the save password prompt before saving them<p>* Firefox will save passwords even in forms that do not have “submit” events<p>* A warning is displayed when a login page does not have a secure connection<p>* Improved video performance for users without GPU acceleration for less CPU usage and a better full screen experience<p>* Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated shading language<p>* Added support for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback
The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in their release summary post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):<p><a href="https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/" rel="nofollow">https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/</a>
The password warning is a great move by Mozilla.<p>They tackle a very common misconception: Many people think it's enough to transfer the password encrypted, because they think https is only about secrecy. But it's crucial to also submit the form via https, otherwise attackers can mess with the form itself.<p>A lot of webpages will be surprised by this, there are still quite a few who have insecure login forms.
I see the WebGL improvements and how on their blog they market it as "Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming" and I really have to say, as a game developer, I really don't want the future of gaming to be on the web. This is more than just Javascript hate. It's hard to monetize games if you aren't going free to play with microtransactions. And really, on a personal level, I just like downloading games and playing them offline. I'm not always near internet access.
Flac playback and more work on E10s, this is a pretty sweet release.<p>Switching to Skia on linux for rendering is interesting too, I wonder how this affects rendering performance and correctness vs cairo ?
From 2014: "Choose Firefox now, or you won't get a choice later" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163</a>
Was using Firefox from a very long time , but for some reason recently Firefox is very slow on my machine . Even chromium starts up slowly . Google Chrome opens the fastest and is very light on resources .
...still no "smooth pinch-to-zoom" like Safari and Chromium have had for years :'(<p>Zooming is such a basic thing, and it really sucks in Firefox in my opinion (using a Macbook with its trackpad that is.. if using a mouse it obviously doesn't apply)
Warning to Vimperator users: some Vimperator features are currently broken in this release. See <a href="https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/568" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/568</a>
> Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated shading language<p>Can anyone explain that last bit. I know WebGL 2 goes with GLSL ES 3.0, but that seems to be the same ol' GLSL with a few tweaks. Is this "new sophisticated shading language" just overblown PR, or is there an actual new shading language?
Is anyone else facing trouble in updating Firefox from the 'Help->About' dialog? Whenever a new Firefox version is released, this dialog promptly gives me the new release, but this time it has decided to stick to 50.1.0 (while going to the Firefox download site directly downloads 51.0)