2013 is winding to a close, but before you spend the rest of the year relaxing, enjoying Christmas, or whatever you feel like doing, we've got a present for the internet. Firefox 26 will be released tomorrow for both Desktop and Android. We've also got a special surprise for ESR as well :)
Desktop After a few quiet releases this is a fairly substantial update, with changes to security, the update experience and all around performance.
- CTP. All versions of Java are going to be click to play blocked in this version of Firefox. This version of the blocklist should e better than when we attempted it a few weeks ago now that we've had some time to tweak the UI. Of course this is still going to be a major change and lots of users will be impacted, but hopefully the UI for the blocklist will do a better job of informing the user.
- Users on Windows who have the Mozilla Maintenance Service enabled can now update Firefox even if they are on a limited user account. We are really excited for this change and hopefully this will help users who had trouble updating Firefox in that past update a little more smoothly.
- Security is much improved in this version with a better implementation of CSP, the CTP Java block, as well as several holes we found in this version and patched up
- Performance changes and other minor fixes. View the complete release notes at http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/26.0/releasenotes/ after the release tomorrow.
Android Android is also gearing up for a larger release this week, with one highly anticipated feature being the landing of the new home page UI.
- New about:home page that allows for more advanced customization of the top sites, pinning, and improves the find-ability of bookmarks and history.
- Performance improvements on NVIDIA devices and faster page rendering on all devices
- All the same under the hood tweaks and security fixes (except CTP) that desktop has. http://www.mozilla.org/mobile/26.0/releasenotes/
ESR Just as an FYI, ESR 17 will no longer be receiving any updates, and all ESR 17 users with auto-updates enabled will be auto-updated to Firefox 24.2 tomorrow.