14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla on Thursday announced the release of Firefox 56, a minor update of the popular web browser that introduces the new screenshot tool and various other improvements to offer you the best possible browsing experience.
Firefox 56 comes almost three months after the Firefox 55 release, and it's the first version of the web browser to offer the new, built-in screenshot tool that Mozilla worked on for the last few months to all users. Dubbed Firefox Screenshots, the tool lets users take screenshots of entire web pages or just parts of them.
These screenshots can be saved locally or in the Firefox Screenshots cloud, and it's also possible to share them through various online services. Furthermore, Firefox 56 improves the Send Tabs feature of the Sync for iOS and Android functionality to allow it to be discovered by users that don't have a Firefox Account.
Firefox 56 also updates the Preferences page with a new search tool that lets users quickly find a particular setting, rewritten descriptions for better readability of choices and how they affect your browsing. The data collection choices was also revised in this release to better align with the updated Privacy Notice.
Safe Browsing protocol updated to version 4
Among other noteworthy changes implemented in the Firefox 56 release, we can mention support for address form autofill, but only for the en-US language, hardware acceleration for AES-GCM, a Layout Panel to CSS Grid DevTools, better security when verifying update downloads, and reduced OTA update to about 20 percent.
Firefox 56 also updated the Safe Browsing protocol to version 4, replaced the character encoding converters with a Rust-based Encoding Standard-compliant implementation, and it will no longer start the playback of media on a newly opened tab until the user accesses it.
While not mentioned in the release notes, it would appear that Mozilla also blocked the Adobe Flash Player plugin in Firefox 56 by default. You can download Firefox 56 for GNU/Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows right now from our website or update from Firefox 55.0.3 via the "About Firefox" dialog. Firefox 52.4.0 ESR is also available for download today.