Mozilla has released Firefox 49 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The latest update to the popular open-source web browser introduces a range of (always) welcome improvements.
Among them, Firefox 49 ships with native support for the Widevine CDM on Linux. This enables you to watch Netflix (and other DRM-protected HTML5 video content) without any cumbersome workarounds.
Hello Goes Bye-Bye, and Multiprocess Rollout Continues
Firefox Hello, the browser’s woefully overlooked WebRTC chat feature, goes bye-bye in Firefox 49, as we warned you it would.
The feature, which has shipped with the browser since Firefox 34, is removed on upgrade. If you want to keep it (for now) you’ll need to hold off on upgrading.
Mozilla’s new ‘e10’ multi-process architecture rolls out to a wider set of Firefox users with this update. Also known as ‘Electrolysis’, e10 promises to offer improved security and performance, with page rendering gains of as much as 700 percent over non-e10 enabled browsers.
The handy Firefox Reader mode also sees some improvement in Firefox 49. You can now adjust the width and line-spacing of articles presented in read more, while the new Narrate icon lets you click it to have articles read out loud.
HTML5 audio and video elements sport two new options: play at 1.25x speed (handy if you’re listening to a talk or lecture) and loop playback (handy for making a 2 second MP4 video play on loop for all eternity).
Download Firefox 49
Those of you running Ubuntu don’t need to do anything special to upgrade as Firefox 49 will arrive through the Software Updater app.
Firefox is not (currently) available as a Snap package or a Flatpak.
If you’re running an unsupported version of Ubuntu, a derivative, or simply can’t wait to run this release, you can download Firefox 49 from the official Mozilla Firefox website, linked to below.