
Firefox 55 for developers - matthberg
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/55
======
callahad
Not exactly sure why this is here, but for context, Firefox 54 shipped this
week, and 55 was promoted to Beta.

As part of our effort to eliminate the pre-beta ("aurora") channel, 55 spent
twice as long in development: instead of promoting to "aurora" six weeks ago,
it stayed in nightly until this week, where it moved directly to beta. Future
releases will continue this nightly -> beta -> release cadence.

A few of the changes in 55:

\- startup and session restoration are dramatically faster, as we can now
defer almost all of the work related to restoring unloaded tabs.

\- SharedArrayBuffer is also getting turned on by default, and my teammate Lin
Clark just wrote an excellent three-part article on it at
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/a-crash-course-in-
memory-m...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/a-crash-course-in-memory-
management/)

\- Object destructuring / spread, async generators, and requestIdleCallback
are all in.

\- WebVR 1.1 is enabled on Windows, with other platforms working in Nightly

\- Flash is moving to click-to-activate

\- WebExtensions will be able to configure proxy settings

...And a whole bunch of miscellaneous performance improvements, features, and
the further rollout of multiple content processes in stable Firefox.

All of this is leading up to Firefox 57, which will be a major release in
November that marks the deprecation of legacy add-on APIs in favor of cross-
browser "WebExtensions", an overhauled UI ("Photon"), and the integration of
many components from the Servo Parallel Browser Project ("Quantum").

~~~
JohnTHaller
If Developer and Beta are both 55b2, what's the point of having the two
separate channels any longer?

~~~
callahad
The underlying engine is the same as in Beta, but the product itself is built
with different flags, default settings, and other features. For example, add-
on signing is optional in Developer Edition, so it's better suited for
developing Firefox add-ons than Beta. Similarly, we may ship new versions of
the DevTools into DevEdition before they're ready for the broader Release
population.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Ah, forgot about the add-on signing. Having Dev Tools tests makes sense, too.

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bigato
Wow, finally we have <input type=date> and <input type=time> in firefox. Thank
you!

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the8472
Is the #SVG fragment in the link intentional?

~~~
sctb
Not sure, but we've removed that anchor from the link.

