14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla announced yesterday plans to ship TLS 1.3, the upcoming and still-under-development version of the TLS security protocol, with Firefox 52, set to launch next year.
Mozilla had previously added support for TLS 1.3 in the Developer Edition of Firefox 49, launched in mid-June.
In an announcement, Martin Thomson, Principal Engineer at Mozilla and member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the committee responsible for the architectural oversight of the IETF standards process, has said that Firefox 52 will be the first stable branch of Mozilla's browser where TLS 1.3 will be enabled for all users.
Currently, Firefox Developer Edition users have to modify a parameter in the about:config page to activate TLS 1.3 support in their browsers.
TLS protocol embraced by Mozilla, Chrome, Microsoft, CloudFlare
The TLS protocol is the basic layer on which HTTPS websites work. TLS handles the secure operations needed to establish encrypted communications between the user's browser and a web server.
TLS 1.3 is currently still a draft at IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), and you can read more about it on the IETF website.
"TLS 1.3 removes old and unsafe cryptographic primitives, it is built using modern analytic techniques to be safer, it is always forward secure, it encrypts more data, and it is faster than TLS 1.2," Thomson wrote to fellow Mozillians explaining his decision. "TLS 1.3 also provides a 0-RTT mode which removes the round-trip of handshake latency."
Thomson said Mozilla plans to ship draft 16 of the TLS 1.3 specification, but this will be updated as new versions come out, and eventually the final implementation is released.
In September, CloudFlare announced it added support for TLS 1.3 on its servers. Fellow browser vendors, such as Microsoft and Google have announced TLS 1.3 support with Edge and Chrome Canary.
Mozilla releases Firefox 49.0.2
Also yesterday, Mozilla released version 49.0.2 of Firefox, which adds a new system add-on called Asynchronous Plugin Rendering. Mozilla says this new plugin will improve performance and reduce crashes for sites that use the Flash plugin.
Firefox 49.0.2 also includes a second system add-on, one that deactivates Direct3D9 fallback if hardware acceleration is enabled in Firefox. This should improve graphics rendering in Firefox.
You can get a fresh copy of Firefox 49.0.2 and install it over your older version to upgrade manually. Firefox 49.0.2 is already available for download right now via Softpedia, for Linux, Mac, and Windows users.