Most of you will probably have no need to go to Mozilla Firefox’s site and download the latest version, as today the browser auto-updates on most platforms. Nonetheless just in case you do, there’s a download button at the bottom of the post.
After 49 major previous versions Firefox still has much room for improvements, not to mention the planned changes down the road, and therefore here are some of the most noteworthy features included in Firefox 50.0:
Firefox 50.0 – What’s New?
Desktop
In the desktop department Firefox 50.0 has cooked us many nice new features, one such that affects all platforms is the update to keyboard shortcuts. Now on:
– Ctrl+Tab cycle through tabs in recently used order.
– Ctrl+Alt+R (command+alt+r on Mac) will enable you to view a page in Reader Mode.
Another great feature many, however non-Windows users, will be happy to gain is the new built-in Emoji set that’s been now added.
Back to the features all platforms will enjoy having, there’s a new option to “Find” in page that allows users to limit search to whole words only.
WebGL technology, which enables better graphics rendering, will now be available to more than 98 percent of users on Windows 7 and newer.
And speaking of graphics, improved support for video playback (through WebM EME) has also been added in this release.
From a security stand point, there’s a new download protection for a large number of executable file types corresponding to Windows, Mac and Linux platforms which comes in addition to various other security fixes.
Android
In the Android department, a couple of noteworthy features were also added, first being is the added support for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) of videos via player overlay.
The second is the simplification of the user interface by combining the Recent Tabs and History panels.
That said, there’s still room for privacy improvements, especially on the Firefox for Android’s side.
