Firefox Releases Articles
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Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum
A team of computer science students from Michigan State University's capstone program went to work on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Their goal: Expand upon the existing “lightweight” Theming API in Quantum to allow for more areas of customization. Themes had the ability to alter the appearance of the default toolbars, but did not have the ability to style menus, or customize auto-complete popups -- till now. The team also worked on adding a more fluid transition when dynamic themes change, to allow for a smoother user experience.
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Firefox 61 – Quantum of Solstice
Firefox 61 is now available, bringing new performance improvements that make the fox faster than ever! We're keen on the Retained Display Lists feature to improve performance while an interactive page is painted; the Accessibility Inspector baked in to our tooling to support assistive technology users; more powerful tab management for power users; and many more Dev Tools updates and enhancements.
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Retained Display Lists for improved page performance
Display list building is the process in which we collect the set of high-level items to display on screen (borders, backgrounds, text and much more), and then sort the list, according to CSS painting rules, into the correct back-to-front order. By retaining the display list and only reloading the assets that have changed since first paint, we are able to optimize painting performance especially for highly interactive pages. Look for this feature in this week's release of Firefox 61.
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New in Firefox 61: Developer Edition
The latest release -- Firefox 61 Developer Edition -- comes with a darker dark theme, more powerful and customizable developer tools, the new Accessibility Inspector, and numerous performance improvements like better CSS stylesheet parsing and improved time to first paint.
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Debugging Modern Web Applications
The Firefox Dev Tools team released an upgrade to the debugger’s source map support. It lets you inspect the code that you actually wrote. Combined with the ongoing work to provide first-class JS framework support across all Firefox devtools, these advances boost productivity for web app developers working in frameworks like React, Angular, and Ember and with modern tools like Webpack, Babel, and PostCSS.
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Firefox 60 – Modules and More
Firefox 60 continues the evolution of Quantum. The parallel processing of Quantum CSS comes to Firefox for Android, while WebRender work is ongoing. Potch reports on two security upgrades - support for the Web Authentication API and for the Same-Site attribute for cookies - as well the arrival of ES modules. Firefox Quantum for Enterprise, our Extended Support Release, is now available for large installations. Read all about it!
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Shipping a security update of Firefox in less than a day
One of Mozilla’s top priorities is to keep our users safe; this commitment is written into our mission. As soon as we discover a critical issue in Firefox, we plan a rapid mitigation. This post describes how we fixed a Pwn2Own exploit discovery and released new builds of the browser in less than 22 hours, through the collaborative and well-coordinated efforts of a global cross-functional team.
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Forging Better Tools for the Web
2017 was a big year for Firefox DevTools. We updated and refined the UI, refactored three of the panels, squashed countless bugs, and shipped several new features. This work not only provides a faster and better DevTools experience, but lays the groundwork for some exciting new features and improvements for 2018 and beyond.
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Firefox 58: The Quantum Era Continues
2017 was a big year for Mozilla, culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, a massive multi-year re-tooling of the browser focused on speed, and laying the groundwork for 2018 releases. Here's a roundup of some of the goodies in Firefox 58: including Off-Main-Thread Painting (OTMP) and other Gecko engine performance improvements, new support for CSS `font-display`, new Add to Home screen support in Firefox for Android, and more.
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Making WebAssembly even faster: Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With streaming compilation, 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. Firefox 58 also includes a new 2-tiered compiler. The new baseline compiler compiles code 10–15 times faster than the optimizing compiler. Combined, these two changes mean we compile code faster than it comes in from the network.
