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After releasing Firefox 63 in October this year, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 64, yesterday. This release comes with support for multiple tab selection, WebVR 1.1 on macOS, and improvements in privacy features. Mozilla has also released Firefox 65 beta with support for WebP, Flexbox Inspector tool, and more.

Following are some of the updates Firefox 64 comes with:

Support for multiple tab selection

Firefox 64 introduces multiple tab selection to make managing windows with many open tabs easier. You can use this feature by simply holding Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. After selecting the tab, click and drag to move the tabs as a group, either within a given window or out into a new window.

Developer Tools improvements

  • When you hover over text, the Accessibility Inspector will now display the text contrast ratios in the pop-up infobar. Once an element is selected by the Accessibility Inspector, the highlighters show the AA contrast ratio.
  • The infobar will also indicate whether or not the text meets WCAG 2.0 Level AA or AAA accessibility guidelines for minimum contrast.
  • Responsive Design Mode now supports saving device selection between session.

JavaScript improvements

  • The well-formed JSON.stringify proposal by TC39 (Technical Committee 39) has been implemented. This will ensure that JSON.stringify does not returns ill-formed Unicode strings.
  • Another improvement is that now the proxied functions can be passed to Function.prototype.toString .call().

New Web API highlights

  • The prefix has been removed from the mozRequestFullScreen API and it is now just the FullScreen API. Also, the requestFullscreen and exitFullscreen APIs now return promises that resolve once the browser finishes transitioning between states.
  • Firefox 64 now supports WebVR 1.1 on macOS.
  • To receive queued worker messages even before page loading has completed, pages with Service Workers can now use the startMessages() API.

Better protection with new and updated privacy features

  • Firefox 64 will not trust TLS certificates issued by Symantec.
  • Referrer-Policy now applies to requests initiated by CSS.
  • The non-standard navigator.buidID property will now return a fixed timestamp, 20181001000000, to prevent its potential abuse for fingerprinting

Firefox 65 beta release

Along with Firefox 64, Mozilla has also released Firefox 65 beta, the stable version of which is planned to be released on Jan 29, 2019. Following are few of the updates introduced in this release:

  • You can now change the display language for the Firefox application in the Options page.
  • WebP, an image format that provides both lossy and lossless compression, is supported.
  • Users can now install Firefox on Windows using an MSI installer.
  • Handoff is supported in Firefox for macOS to continue browsing from your iOS device to your Mac.
  • Tabs can be switched by scrolling in the tab bar in Linux.
  • A new Flexbox inspector tool is added to detect and highlight Flexbox containers and debug Flex items’ sizes.
  • Support is added for the Storage Access API on desktop platforms.

See the full list of updates on Mozilla’s website.

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Bhagyashree R