Today, Mozilla is rolling out a new version of Firefox. The new version includes a number of changes you might be interested in knowing. The new build should be delivered to your PC tomorrow or today using the default Firefox update service. Let's see what has changed under the hood of this new build.
Probably, the most notable change for users who care about the add-ons signature being enforced in the future is the option xpinstall.signatures.required in about:config still being retained.
Another new addition is VP9 and H.264 codec support. For H.264, the installed decoder is required.
Starting with Firefox 44, you can turn on Do not disturb mode, which will suppress browser notifications. This is a very good option for those who want to focus on one particular task in the browser without getting disturbed. You don't need to see notifications while doing activities like writing a blog post, or making an online payment or anything else that requires your full attention.
This new option is located on the Content page of preferences:
Firefox 44 will consider web forms which require entering the login and password over an unencrypted HTTP connection as insecure. A notification will be triggered for pages which contain the special HTML field, "<input type="password" />".
The reason Mozilla made this change is because the user input can be captured by a third party if the connection is not HTTPS. The browser will show with an icon in the address bar that the connection is not secure. To avoid this, web developers are recommended to use the secure HTTPS protocol whenever necessary to receive user authentication data.
Another surprise addition in Firefox 44 is the Brotli compression algorithm. This compression algorithm was made by Google. Firefox developers decided to add it immediately.
Besides these changes, the RC4 encryption for web site certificates will cause a warning about the connection being insecure. Windows builds of the browser will use SHA-256 signing certificate.
As of this writing, the compiled builds of Firefox 44 can be found only on Mozilla's FTP server:
When the new version is announced officially, it will be updated automatically. If not, see Fix Firefox does not update itself automatically.
More details can be found in these release notes.
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