It's available for Ubuntu 17.10, 16.04 LTS, and 14.04 LTS

Jan 24, 2018 22:35 GMT  ·  By

Canonical announced today that the recently released Mozilla Firefox 58.0 web browser is now available for download from the software repositories of all supported Ubuntu Linux releases.

Mozilla officially launched the Firefox 58.0 "Quantum" web browser the other day, on January 23, 2018, bringing numerous improvements and new features like a two-tiered compiler and streaming compilation support to make WebAssembly even faster, WebVR support for Mac OS X users, and support for credit card info in the autofill feature.

Firefox 58.0 also improves the Firefox Screenshots functionality by making it run in the Private Browsing mode and allow users to copy and paste screenshots directly to their clipboard, optimizes the loading of web pages by implementing a method to cache JavaScript internal representation, and improved web page rendering speed on Windows systems with Off-Main-Thread Painting.

Ubuntu users can now install Firefox 58.0

The Mozilla Firefox 58.0 web browser is now available for the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, and users of these OSes can install the new Firefox version directly from the stable software repositories of their respective Ubuntu release using the instruction provided by Canonical at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

If you have Firefox installed on your Ubuntu PC, you can update to Firefox 58.0 right now by opening the Terminal app and running the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox" command. To see the security content of the Firefox 58 "Quantum" release, don't hesitate to study the new Ubuntu Security Notice published by Canonical today.

You can also download the Firefox 58.0 binaries for 32-bit or 64-bit systems, as well as the source package if you don't want to have it installed on your PC. Other Linux users are urged to check the software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the new Firefox 58 release and install it as soon as possible because it mitigates the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities.