Firefox 58 marks the first major announcement since mid-November last year, when Mozilla published Firefox 57, a version that improved large parts of the Firefox codebase, including its old add-on system, with Mozilla adopting a new system based on the Chromium-compatible and regulated WebExtensions API.
These changes have extended two months later, in today’s Firefox 58 release. Except for a few differences to Firefox’s settings panel, most of the new Firefox points are under the browser’s hood.
For example, Firefox 58 comes with a new point called Off-Main-Thread painting, which are increases to Firefox’s built-in graphics engine.
There is also a new system called the JavaScript Startup Bytecode Cache (JSBC) for decreasing the browser startup time, and the combination of WebRender, a new web-rendering engine initially developed for Mozilla Servo testbed browser, and which has now been blended into Firefox. Other under-the-hood feature improvements are detailed here.
On the UI side, Firefox 58 includes provision for auto-filling credit card details, a feature that users can disable or permit from the Privacy section of the browser’s settings panel.
Changes have also been made to the Firefox screenshot tool, which can now copy-paste screenshots directly to the OS clipboard, and the screenshot tool aka Firefox Screenshots now also accomplishes in Private Browsing mode.
Firefox 58 is also the version where Mozilla programmed to block user fingerprinting attempts via the HTML5 canvas element.
Engineers also rolled out a security-related change: Firefox 58 being the first Firefox iteration that blocks users from accessing “data:” URLs in certain situations, to safeguard users from a well-known phishing attack scenario.
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