Firefox 58 is Out, Here’s Everything You Need to Know

Mozilla today released a new version of their Firefox browser. Firefox 58 reached the stable branch. Let's see what has changed.

Firefox 57 (with the new Quantum engine) was a huge step forward for Mozilla. The browser introduced a new user interface, codenamed "Photon". The browser now comes without support for XUL-based add-ons, so all of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible. See

Must have add-ons for Firefox Quantum

Thanks to the changes made to the engine and the UI, the browser is blazingly fast. The user interface of the app is more responsive and it also starts up noticeably faster. The engine renders web pages much faster than it ever did in the Gecko era.

 

Here are the key changes in Firefox 58.

Performance

The browser is now using WebAssembly. Decoding WebAssembly is much simpler and faster than parsing JavaScript. The browser can compile 30-60 megabytes of WebAssembly code per second, which is a great result!

Another performance improvement is a dedicated thread for rendering web page contents. It makes the browser more responsive and faster. The technology is called "Off-Main-Thread painting".

WebExtensions

In this release, the WebExtensions API has got a number of improvements. Here are the new features.

• The ability to warn the user if an extension has changed the browser's home page, its startup page or the new tab page. This will help the user quickly identify which extension exactly made the change and disable or uninstall it.
• Extensions are now able to replace the search engine. The browser will show a confirmation prompt to prevent add-ons from silently changing your default search engine.
• Reader Mode has got its own API and can be activated with an extension.
• Various improvements to the webRequest APIs

Screenshots

As you may already know, starting with Firefox 54 the browser comes with a new Screenshots feature which allows the user to capture an opened web page and save it to a file or upload it for sharing. With Firefox 58, the screenshots feature allows the user to copy the captured image directly to the clipboard. Also, it now works in Private Mode too.

Download Firefox 58

To get the browser, visit the following link:

Download Firefox

You will see a number of folders. Click on one of the following folders:

• win32 - Firefox for Windows 32-bit
• win64 - Firefox for Windows 64-bit
• linux-i686 - Firefox for 32-bit Linux
• linux-x86_64 - Firefox for 64-bit Linux
• mac - Firefox for macOS

Each folder has subfolders organized by the browser's language. Click on the desired language and download the installer.

That's it.