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Firefox 50.0 Officially Released for Linux, Mac and Windows, Here's What's New

It's not a major release, but it brings interesting changes

Nov 15, 2016 22:40 GMT  ·  By
Mozilla Firefox 50.0
   Mozilla Firefox 50.0

Today, November 15, 2016, Mozilla unveiled the final release of the Firefox 50.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

We reported the other day that the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser was available for download for all supported platforms, and we've also revealed many of its new features and improvements. However, Mozilla now published the final release notes to inform us about all the major changes implemented in this important milestone, versioned 50.0.

Here's what's new in Firefox 50.0

Prominent new features of Mozilla Firefox 50.0 include updated keyboard shortcuts for cycling through tabs in the recently used order (Ctrl+Tab), as well as for viewing a web page with the built-in Reader Mode (Ctrl+Alt+R on Linux and Windows or Command+Alt+R on macOS), and a new option for searching whole words only with the "Find in page" functionality.

Firefox 50.0 brings support for the Guarani (gn) language, makes the WebGL (Web Graphics Library) accessible to more than 98% of Windows 7, 8 or 10 users, implements download protection for even more known executable file types on all supported platforms, and improves the performance for SDK extensions, as well as of the add-ons that use the SDK module loader.

WebM EME support for Widevine on the macOS and Microsoft Windows operating system was implemented as well in Firefox 50.0, allowing users to play video streams on more websites without using any special plugins. And, as we reported yesterday, Mozilla Firefox 50.0 adds native Emoji fonts support for Linux-based distributions and Windows 8.0 and older OSes.

Last but not least, Firefox 50.0 improves rendering of dotted and dashed borders that contain rounded corners and deprecates the use of the libavcodec library versions older than 54.35.1. Various security fixes are present as well, and there are dozens of changes for web developers. Again, you can download Mozilla Firefox 50.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows right now from our website.