14 DAY TRIAL // Today, Mozilla will launch Firefox 49, after it postponed the official release one week to fix two last-minute bugs. The new version is the second-stage release for rolling out multi-process (e10s - Electrolysis) support, which Mozilla officially launched last month with Firefox 48.
The feature on everyone's mind has remained the WebExtensions API, which is to provide integration with the same extensions used by the Chromium browsers such as Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi.
Unknown to many is the fact that the WebExtensions API has been part of Firefox since version 48, and the Mozilla team has constantly worked on improving it. But don't expect to be able to go to the Chrome Web Store and grab one of the "enemy's" extensions just yet.
"Firefox 49 does support the WebExtensions API. However, this doesn't mean you can go to the Chrome Store and install extensions from there," the Firefox product team told Softpedia. "The developers still need to submit the add-on to addons.mozilla.org so it is signed by us and it can be distributed for Firefox."
Basically, you might be already using add-ons running on the new WebExtensions API and you didn't even know it. As for grabbing extensions off the Chrome Web Store, forget about it.
Mozilla removes Firefox Hello
Coming back to the features and changes included in Firefox 49, the first thing users will see when upgrading is the removal of the Hello button, which Mozilla has decided to pull the plug on in July.
Most of the other Firefox changes included in this release are in the browser's underbelly, not really that important, but helpful nevertheless.
For starters, the password manager will now be able to recognize HTTP and HTTPS URLs and merge entries together. In past versions, many passwords would be doubled in the password manager because Firefox would store one entry for the login page's HTTP and another for the HTTPS URL.
Mozilla also announced EOL support for Firefox on Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8, but also for Windows installations running on SSE processors.
TTS support in Firefox's Reader View
The Firefox Reader View, a browser tool that only shows a page's text, now lets users adjust text width and line spacing. Additionally, there's also a "Narrate" feature that reads the text out loud, just in case you want to sit back and relax your eyes.
For the multimedia stack, which in Firefox 48 was rebased on Rust components, Firefox 49 comes with improved video performance on systems that support SSSE3 without hardware acceleration.
Also in the multimedia stack, users will notice that they can now loop audio and video files in the built-in HTML5 audio and video player interface. Last but not least, there is also an option to play audio and video at 1.25x speed, a feature which is available via the context menu.
Firefox 49 blocks nonessential Flash content
Firefox 49 is the first version that will block "nonessential Flash content," such as SWF objects used for tracking users, employed most of the times by advertising networks. Mozilla announced this at the end of July.
On the developer side of things, Firefox 49 comes with support for some webkit-prefixed CSS attributes, which should improve the way websites render in Firefox, especially if they were designed with Chrome in mind.
As for the security-related changes, Firefox 49 now supports TLS 1.3, the browser uses a new mechanism for handling root certificates in Windows, and this recent version also addressed a highly mediatized bug that affected the TOR Browser, which received a security update last Friday.
At the time of writing, Firefox 49 is only available via Mozilla's FTP servers, so you can't upgrade your local installation just yet via the browser's built-in updater.
You can get a fresh copy of Firefox 49 and install it over your older version to upgrade manually. Firefox 49 is already available for download right now via Softpedia, for Linux, Mac, and Windows users.
