ESR stands for Extended Support Release

May 12, 2015 14:25 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has just released the stable version of the Firefox 38.0 Internet browser, which has arrived with some pretty interesting new features, including a new tab-based preference menu.

Users know that each new Firefox release usually brings at least a couple of interesting new features and a ton of smaller improvements that are either for regular people or developers. The same can be said about the current version, which incidentally will also be the base for the next ESR release.

From time to time Mozilla releases a version called ESR, which stands for Extended Support Release. This is perfect for large-scale deployments, such as schools, offices, business, and so on. It's also used by other browsers such as Iceweasel, for example. ESR versions pack more security patches, and they tend to be regarded much better in this regard than regular versions. Previous ESR release was 31.6, so it was about time for another one.

Firefox 38 has a new menu system

Besides the fact that Firefox 38 will be the base for the ESR version, it's also the first stable version to incorporate the new tab-based menus. We took a closer look at these menus when they were still in Beta, and they haven't changed. The basic idea is that they now look more modern and they use a design similar to the rest of the other Internet browsers, such as Google Chrome.

The developers have also explained that support for both elements has been implemented, some of the developers tools have been upgraded, it's now much easier to keep track of articles and blog posts with the Reading List feature, autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username and password fields, and the page load times have been improved.

You can download Firefox 38 from Softpedia for the Linux platform. This is the binary file, so you can't install it, you can just run it. The Windows and Mac OS X versions can be downloaded from Softpedia as well.

Please make sure that you check the entire list of changes and improvements listed below.

Firefox 38 Changelog