What to expect in Firefox 49

Following the release of Firefox 48 beta, Mozilla developers also announced the list of changes we can expect for Firefox 49. Let's see what they are.

The most notable change expected in Firefox 49 will come to its Reader mode.With Firefox 49, the user will be able to use the speech synthesizer to read aloud the page content. It will be possible to adjust the speed of reading and choose between male or female voices. Reader mode will be able to continue playing in the background even if the user switches to other tabs. When the user stops the narration, the browser will remember the position where it was stopped and will allow you to continue reading it out aloud the next time you start the narration.

Additionally, Reader mode will get the ability to adjust the line height and indents.

Firefox 49 will also allow you to loop HTML5 audio and video. To do that, the context menu of the media element will get the appropriate item. You will be able to right click on the media and find commands to loop the playback or increase the speed to 1.25 times.

Other notable changes expected in Firefox 49 are:

• Improved video performance on computers without video hardware acceleration but with CPUs which support the SSE3 instruction set.
• Further WebExtensions API improvements to support history API, advanced TransitionType property. Loading more Chrome extensions in Firefox will be possible.
• D3D11 WARP support for Windows 7.
• On Windows, Firefox 49 will require a CPU with the SSE2 instruction set. This means that Firefox will not run on CPUs older than Pentium 4.
• Improved performance in Mac OS X on systems without hardware video acceleration.
• Improved font smoothing in Mac OS X.

Read more details in the following official announccement.