14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla announced today that it will release the Firefox 58.0 web browser next week, after a one week delay, with yet another speed boost by introducing a new streaming and tiering compiler.
On January 23, Mozilla plans to release the final version of the Firefox 58.0 web browser for Linux, Windows, and macOS operating systems. Firefox 58.0 is the first release of the web browser to come built-in with the security fixes to address the Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks that could allow an attacker to use malicious scripts to steal your sensitive data like passwords or credit card info.
Apart from that, Firefox 58.0 is coming with another speed boost by introducing streaming compilation to allow the web browser to compile the code while it's downloading, as well as a new two-tiered baseline compiler that promises to compile code up to 15 times faster than the optimizing compiler, making WebAssembly even faster. All the juicy details about these improvements can be found here.
"One of these speedups is streaming compilation, where the browser compiles the code while the code is still being downloaded. Up until now, this was just a potential future speedup. But with the release of Firefox 58 next week, it becomes a reality," said Lin Clark. "Firefox 58 also includes a new 2-tiered compiler. The new baseline compiler compiles code 10–15 times faster than the optimizing compiler."
Here's what's new in Firefox 58.0
Among other new features that Mozilla implemented in the Firefox 58.0 release, we can mention that the WebVR technology is now enabled by enabled for Mac OS X users, the built-in form autofill now remembers credit card information, web page loading was optimized by caching JavaScript internal representation, and Nepali (ne-NP) locale is now supported.
Firefox 58.0 also improves the speed of the web page render for Windows users with the Off-Main-Thread Painting technology, deprecates downgrading of profiles to previous versions, and addresses a crash reporting issue from previous releases that unwittingly send background tab crash reports to Mozilla without user's knowledge.
In the preliminary release notes, Mozilla also noted the fact that Firefox occasionally crashes on Linux and Windows PCs with Intel Broadwell-U processors that don't have an up-to-date microcode. To fix the issue, Linux users should install the latest Intel microcode firmware and Windows users must install all updates from Windows Update.
Again, Mozilla plans to release the Firefox 58.0 web browser on January 23, 2018, but you can go ahead and download the latest beta for GNU/Linux distributions, as well as for Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems right now through our software portal for an early taste.
