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Firefox 50 is out today: brings massively improved start-up speeds

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has reached a big milestone today, with the public release of Firefox 50. The new browser comes with greatly improved start-up speeds and a bunch of new user-friendly features.

As we detailed in our Software section earlier today, the 50th stable version of Firefox is currently rolling out to users on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. The new browser was originally slated to come out earlier this month, but it was delayed.

Luckily for fans of the browser, the delay meant that Mozilla developers got the chance to fix an important bug in Firefox add-on SDK module. This bug was causing massive delays when the program was starting up, especially when users had lots of add-ons.

But now that the bug is fixed, users who upgrade to Firefox 50 should be greeted by massively improved start-up performance. According to some tests, start-up speeds have improved by 35% without add-ons and up to 65% when users rely on add-ons. That’s a massive gain in speed, equating to almost three seconds less when starting the browser.

Other changes in Firefox version 50 include support for emojis even if the base OS doesn’t support them, improved find-on-page functionality, the ability to cycle through tabs with ctrl + tab, new preferences, and a number of other improvements.

You can download Firefox for Windows (X64) right here. To keep up with updates for your favorite programs, including browsers, utilities, and security software, you can check out our Software section by selecting it in the Categories toggle on the main page.

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