Firefox 60 arrives with exciting updates for web developers: Quantum CSS engine, new Web APIs and more

2 min read

Today, web developers are greeted with a new update of the popular Firefox web browser. Firefox 60 hosts a variety of feature additions and updates targeted specifically to the web developer community.

Quantum CSS for Android available now

Firefox has brought their new CSS engine called Quantum CSS (previously known as Stylo) in Firefox for Android. This engine takes advantage of modern hardware, parallelizing the work across all of the cores in your machine running upto almost 18 times faster.

New Web APIs

Two new Web APIs have been added.

The Web Authentication API has been enabled which allows USB tokens for website authentication.
The WebVR API has also been enabled by default on macOS. It provides support for exposing virtual reality devices to web apps.
Firefox 60 also brings a new policy engine and Group Policy support for customized enterprise deployments, using Windows Group Policy or a cross-platform JSON file.

Changes in Javascript

ECMAScript 2015 modules have been enabled by default.
The Array.prototype.values() method has been added again. It was disabled due to compatibility issues in earlier versions.

Changes in CSS

The align-content, align-items, align-self, justify-content, and place-content property values have been updated as per the latest CSS Box Alignment Module Level 3 spec.
The paint-order property has been implemented.

Changes in Developer Tools

In the CSS Pane rules view, the keyboard shortcuts for precise value increments (increase/decrease by 0.1) have changed from Alt + Up/Down to Ctrl + Up/Down and the CSS variable names will now auto-complete.

In Responsive Design Mode, a Reload when… dropdown has been added to allow users to enable/disable automatic page reloads when touch simulation is toggled, or simulated user agent is changed.

Changes in DOM

The dom.workers.enabled pref has been removed, meaning workers can no longer be disabled.
PerformanceResourceTiming is now available in workers.
The PerformanceObserver.takeRecords() method has been implemented.
The Animation.updatePlaybackRate() method has been implemented.
The Gecko-only options object storage option of the IDBFactory.open() method has been deprecated.
Promises can now be used within IndexedDB code.

The entire list of developer centric changes are available on the Mozilla Developer page. You can also file bug in Bugzilla or see the system requirements of this release.