Firefox/Roadmap/Updates

2017-02-27

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

2017-02-06

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

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

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

2017-01-30

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

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

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

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

2017-01-23

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

2017-01-09

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

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

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