Good things come to those who wait, and Firefox users will be delighted to know that Mozilla has just released the Firefox version 50 web browser with enhanced startup speed, download security and fresh keyboard shortcuts. That is despite the delay to the update’s rollout. Mozilla initially planned to launch Firefox 50 a week ago, but canceled the update following discovery of a performance issue in the browser’s SDK module system. The issue involved the longer time spent by add-ons to perform an actual task in a certain function. Fortunately, Mozilla was quick to fix the issue.
Firefox 50 is now officially available in a stable version to the Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. Apparently, the faster startup speed is the upgraded browser’s main draw, especially for users who have installed quite a number of add-ons in the browser. In August of this year, Mozilla also updated the browser to make it more responsive. The upgraded version comes pre-loaded with a default support for emoji, including Linux and older versions of Windows. Mozilla also enhanced the “Find in page” feature of the browser to let users look for an entire set of words. For example, a search for the word Android will highlight all mentions of that particular word.
In addition to the changes mentioned above, Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox introduces some new changes that are focused on security, such as protection against various types of exe. file downloads across multiple computing platforms including Windows. As part of the security update, Firefox now also rejects images, scripts or style sheets whose type is not compatible with the context where the file is loaded. While security is certainly an important thing to improve upon, Mozilla isn’t just focused on bettering the security of the browser, they want to make it more convenient and easy to use as well, and part of how they’re doing that is through the addition of new keyboard shortcuts. With the Firefox version 50 update, there are two new keyboard shortcuts included, which are the Ctrl+Tab shortcut that lets users move through their recently opened tabs, as well as the Ctrl+Alt+R shortcut which is used to pull up reader mode. Keyboard shortcuts aren’t going to be used by everyone, but they do help to streamline and speed up the use of certain actions, and for those who use reader mode often and tend to have a lot of tabs open when they browse, both of these could end up feeling essential to the user experience. The changes to Firefox 50 mentioned above are likely to be the biggest ones for this version of the browser, but there are a few others that were included as well, such as newly added emoji sets for Windows 8 and below.