Firefox 47 Beta has just landed on the Google Play Store, and there’s actually a changelog. Many developers don’t bother with one, so it’s nice to see Firefox posting one up there. There’s a couple of new things here in this update to Firefox Beta. One of which is the ability to show system notifications to highlight features on browser update. This is a nice one to have when Google Play Store decides to auto-update your Firefox Beta on your smartphone or tablet. The other is the “Show/Hide web fonts” being added into the advanced settings to reduce bandwidth and data.
Quite a few things have changed though, in the update. Including the ability to show the main domain or name of organization in the URL bar. The reasoning behind this is to help fight against phishing attacks, as users will now know that they are on a legit web page, and not one that’s phishing for information. The bigger change here is that Firefox has stopped data usage when the app is in the background and a page is using meta refresh. Now this likely won’t save you a ton of data, but it’s still nice to save some data that you could use for something else. Firefox has also opted to change the “Open Multiple Links” under the “Customize” setting in Firefox to “Tab Queue”. And a few other things.
Something that’s important though, is that this is going to be the last update for those running Gingerbread. This means the next update is only going to support Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and higher. With Gingerbread not being that large of a platform these days, that likely won’t affect many users, but it’s still important. Firefox is notifying their users on Gingerbread that they won’t receive any further updates.
The update for Firefox Beta is now available in the Google Play Store. So head on over and pick up the version 47 of Firefox Beta. Definitely some good stuff in this update and worth a download, if you don’t use Chrome as your default browser on your smartphone or tablet.