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Firefox Quantum 68.0

Firefox Quantum

Firefox is a fast, full-featured Web browser. It offers great security, privacy, and protection against viruses, spyware, malware, and it can also easily block pop-up windows. The key features that have made Firefox so popular are the simple and effective UI, browser speed and strong security capabilities.

Quantum is Mozilla's project to build the next-generation web engine for Firefox users, building on the Gecko engine as a solid foundation. Quantum will leverage the fearless concurrency of Rust and high-performance components of Servo to bring more parallelization and GPU offloading to Firefox.

Firefox (Quantum) users will be impressed by the modern new design that puts their needs first. With the new (fast and fluid Photon) design, Firefox leaps ahead with a new interface that reflects today’s reality of High DPI displays and users who are more task focused than they’ve ever been. Photon doesn’t just look good, it’s also smarter. If you’re using Photon on a Windows PC with a touch display, the menus change size based on whether you click with a mouse or touch with a finger.

Firefox includes pop-up blocking, tab-browsing, integrated Google search, simplified privacy controls, a streamlined browser window that shows you more of the page than any other browser and a number of additional features that work with you to help you get the most out of your time online.

What's new:

  • Dark mode in reader view expands so that windows are also dark on the controls, sidebars and toolbars.

Improved extension security and discovery:

  • New reporting feature in about:addons allows you to report security and performance issues with extensions and themes.
  • Redesigned extensions dashboard in about:addons provides easy access to information about your extensions, including data and settings access required by each extension.
  • Find high quality, secure extensions via the Recommended Extensions program in about:addons, which now displays user count and ratings for each extension. "Recommended” badges for these extensions also appear on AMO. More extensions will be added over time.

Other changes:

  • Cryptomining and fingerprinting protections are added to strict content blocking settings in Privacy & Security preferences.
  • WebRender will roll out to Windows 10 users with AMD graphics cards.
  • Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) update download support, which allows Firefox update downloads to continue when Firefox is closed.

Fixed:

  • Various security fixes
  • Local files can no longer access other files in the same directory.

Changed:

  • Unified existing locales (bn-BD, bn-IN) under a single Bengali (bn) localization.
  • The following unmaintained translations have been removed: Assamese (as), English - South Africa (en-ZA), Maithili (mai), Malayalam (ml), Odia (or). Existing users will be migrated to the British English (en-GB) version.
  • When an HTTPS error caused by antivirus software is detected, Firefox will attempt to automatically fix it
  • Camera and microphone access now require an HTTPS connection.
  • The way non-default preferences are synced has changed. Please see this support article for more details

Entreprise:

  • For all operating systems, we have a number of additional policies including:
  • New tab page configuration and disabling
  • Local file links
  • Download behavior
  • Search suggestions
  • Managed storage for using policies in Webextensions
  • Extension whitelisting and blacklisting by ID and website
  • A subset of commonly used Firefox preferences
  • You can see a full list of policies here.

Developer:

  • Developer Information
  • Firefox Developer Tools now offers a full page color contrast audit that identifies all elements on a page that fail color contrast checks.
  • Added about:compat, where website-specific workarounds are listed and may be toggled. These workarounds are meant as temporary fixes for various forms of website breakage for Firefox, while the website fixes them in due time. With about:compat, it is now easy to see all of the workarounds that are active in Firefox, and easy for website developers to disable a given workaround for testing purposes.
  • Introduces CSS Scroll Snap module that enforces scroll snap positions.

Unresolved:

  • The new URL bar implementation does not handle javascript: bookmarklets triggered via bookmark keywords correctly yet (bug 1552141)

Download: Firefox 68.0 for Windows | Firefox 64-bit | ~40.0 MB (Freeware)
Download: Firefox 68.0 for Linux | 64-bit | ~60.0 MB
Download: Firefox 68.0 for MacOS | 65.9 MB
View: Firefox Home Page | Release Notes

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