14 DAY TRIAL // Three days after we reported on the official availability of the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it looks like users of the Ubuntu Linux OS can now install the application.
That's right, Mozilla Firefox 50.0 is now officially available in the repositories of all supported Ubuntu OSes, including Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), and you can use it right now if you update your system.
However, you should not get all that excited because Firefox 50.0 is not a major update. The web browser ships only with native Emoji fonts support, something that most of you won't use anyway, support for cycling through tabs in the recently used order using the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut, and support for searching whole words.
A total of 18 security issues have been patched in Firefox 50.0
Mozilla Firefox 50.0 appears to be more of a security and bugfix release, and according to Canonical's USN-3124-1 security advisory, a total of 18 vulnerabilities were addressed, as the web browser could be made to crash or run programs with the user's rights if a malicious website was accessed.
Don't hesitate to check out the technical details about the security fixes patched in Mozilla Firefox 50.0 by accessing the above Ubuntu Security Notice, but in the meantime, we recommend that you update your Ubuntu OS as soon as possible to be able to install and use Firefox 50.0. Make sure you restart the web browser.
To update, simply open the Ubuntu Software application, access the Updates tab, and install all the updated packages listed there. You can also do it via the command-line by running the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" command in the Terminal app. More details can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.