Firefox 55 for developers | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 55 for developers

developer.mozilla.org

54 pointsmatthberg21 comments

Not exactly sure why this is here, but for context, Firefox 54 shipped this week, and 55 was promoted to Beta.

As part of our effort to eliminate the pre-beta ("aurora") channel, 55 spent twice as long in development: instead of promoting to "aurora" six weeks ago, it stayed in nightly until this week, where it moved directly to beta. Future releases will continue this nightly -> beta -> release cadence.

A few of the changes in 55:

- startup and session restoration are dramatically faster, as we can now defer almost all of the work related to restoring unloaded tabs.

- SharedArrayBuffer is also getting turned on by default, and my teammate Lin Clark just wrote an excellent three-part article on it at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/a-crash-course-in-memory-m...

- Object destructuring / spread, async generators, and requestIdleCallback are all in.

- WebVR 1.1 is enabled on Windows, with other platforms working in Nightly

- Flash is moving to click-to-activate

- WebExtensions will be able to configure proxy settings

...And a whole bunch of miscellaneous performance improvements, features, and the further rollout of multiple content processes in stable Firefox.

All of this is leading up to Firefox 57, which will be a major release in November that marks the deprecation of legacy add-on APIs in favor of cross-browser "WebExtensions", an overhauled UI ("Photon"), and the integration of many components from the Servo Parallel Browser Project ("Quantum").

> - Flash is moving to click-to-activate

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but hasn't this been the default for a long while already?

Apparently not on the release channel, according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1317856 and https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-.... I'd verify, but I'm not about to voluntarily install Flash ;)

Don't forget the huge perf improvements to session restore!

> _All of this is leading up to Firefox 57, which will be a major release in November that marks the deprecation of legacy add-on APIs in favor of cross-browser "WebExtensions", an overhauled UI ("Photon"), and the integration of many components from the Servo Parallel Browser Project ("Quantum")._

Is Firefox getting a more modern icon anytime soon? it's starting to show its age.

Mozilla's recent rebranding has stirred up more discussions about redrawing or refining the Firefox logo, but that's a perennial topic of discussion. If it happens, I'd expect it to be coordinated with 57's release, but this is totally uninformed speculation. I work remotely and have limited contact with the design folks.

To me, the current icon looks fine on macOS. It matches the style of Safari and other stock apps better than the Chrome icon.

I don't think the issue is modern vs old, but different styles across operating systems. It probably looks out out of place on current Android versions, for example.

Both Safari and Chrome have recently adopted a 'flatter' version of their icon colours. Firefox still holds on to quite a few gradients.

So has Firefox, the previous icon looked like this: https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/gallery/images...

Deprecation only?

I thought support for legacy add-ons would be removed in FF 57.

You're right. They've been deprecated for a while, now, and will be removed with 57.

May I ask about the smart zoom feature? Moving back from Chrome it seems missing that when you double-tap twice on the touchpad, the current paragraph is smartly zoomed to take the full screen width.

it's also missing touchpad pinch zoom

If Developer and Beta are both 55b2, what's the point of having the two separate channels any longer?

I think Mozilla may want to encourage non-devs to beta test. And/or us users of the Dev Edition are a captive audience, willing (maybe even eager) to beta test, while still wanting the (extra) dev tools.

The underlying engine is the same as in Beta, but the product itself is built with different flags, default settings, and other features. For example, add-on signing is optional in Developer Edition, so it's better suited for developing Firefox add-ons than Beta. Similarly, we may ship new versions of the DevTools into DevEdition before they're ready for the broader Release population.

Ah, forgot about the add-on signing. Having Dev Tools tests makes sense, too.

Wow, finally we have <input type=date> and <input type=time> in firefox. Thank you!

Is the #SVG fragment in the link intentional?

Not sure, but we've removed that anchor from the link.

Nope, I had been at that section reading and accidentally missed deleting it when copying over the URL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com