Rolling out now to Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms

May 21, 2019 14:12 GMT  ·  By

After a one-week delay due to a major issue with its add-ons mechanism, Open Source company Mozilla officially released the Firefox 67 cross-platform web browser today for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.

Mozilla Firefox 67 comes with numerous performance improvements and new features to make your Firefox browsing experience better. To improve the overall performance, Mozilla did a few internal changes, such as to lower the priority of the "setTimeout" function during loading of web pages, delayed the component initialization until after Firefox's start up, as well as to suspend unused tabs.

A key feature of the Firefox 67 release, which most users will love, it's a built-in cryptominer blocker, which blocks fingerprinters as well. You can find it in the Custom settings page of the Content Blocking preferences, so if you notice that your Firefox web browser eats too much RAM and CPU, try enabling these functions immediately and restart the web browser.

The Private Browsing mode has been improved as well in this release and it now lets users save passwords for websites, as well as to choose the add-ons they don't want to be included in the private tabs. The keyboard accessibility was also enhanced to make both the toolbar and toolbar overflow menu, including add-ons and downloads panel, fully accessible with the keyboard.

Firefox is now easier to use

With the Firefox 67 release, Mozilla made its popular and open-source web browser easier to use for everyone by implementing a toolbar menu for easy access and more transparency of your Firefox Account, support for pinning tabs from the Page Actions menu in the address bar, as well as the ability to highlight various features, such as Pin Tabs.

Furthermore, it's now easier to access the list of your saved website credentials directly from the main menu and login autocomplete, quickly import web data from other web browsers directly from the File menu, and run different versions (e.g. beta, nightly, and stable) of Firefox side by side by default at the same time.

Among other noteworthy changes included in Firefox 67, we can mention support for the dav1d AV1 higher performance decoder for better and bandwidth friendly video streaming, protection against running older versions of Firefox that may lead to data corruption or crashes, and support for registrations for Google Accounts using the FIDO U2F API.

Support for the new Reiwa era in Japan has been added as well, along with support for Emoji 11.0, support for ARM64 Windows devices in Mozilla's JavaScript compiler, and an improved Pocket experience in Firefox Home. The WebRender feature is now enabled by default for all Windows 10 users that have a computer equipped with an Nvidia graphics card.

What's new for Android users

For Android users, Firefox 67 brings a new Firefox Search widget that features voice input. Users can add the new widget from the Android Widget section to their home screen. Additionally, Firefox 67 for Android removes the Guest Session feature in an attempt to streamline the user experience. Users are urged to use Private Browsing instead.

It's also worth mentioning that Firefox 67 changes the way add-ons behave in Private Windows, meaning that users will now need to allow newly installed extensions to work in Private Windows in the preferences, and it's no longer possible to upload and share screenshots via the Firefox Screenshots server as it will be closed in the coming months.

Firefox 67 is now rolling out to Windows and Mac users via OTA (Over-the-Air) updates, so you can install it just by accessing the About Firefox window. Linux users will have to wait until Firefox 67 is available in the stable software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions. Alternatively, you can download Firefox 67 for Linux, macOS, and Windows from Softpedia.