Earlier today, Mozilla pushed Firefox 62 for desktop and Android. With the release, Mozilla has introduced an UI refresh for the new tabs page as well as several dialogs like for adding or editing a bookmark, several performance enhancements to speed up browsing, and some security enhancements.
The first change that users will notice is the refreshed new tab page; with Firefox 62 users can now display up to four rows of top sites, Pocket stories and highlights. Currently, you get one row of top sites, and depending on your location you may not even get shown Pocket stories. Another UI changes that you’ll notice is in the menu where you can toggle tracking protection on and off easily.
On the performance side of things, Windows users will now get improved graphics rendering without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting. Additionally, support for CSS Shapes allows for richer web page layouts, and CSS Variable Fonts support allows the browser to render “beautiful typography” with a single font file.
Firefox for Android also comes with some improvements including better scrolling performance and faster page load times over WiFi connections by loading from the network cache if disk cache is slow. Additionally, an issue that caused WebRTC video sessions between Firefox for Android and Safari browsers to not work has been fixed.
In terms of improved security, Adobe Flash applets now run in a more secure mode on macOS by using process sandboxing, and users disconnecting from Sync have the option to wipe their Firefox profile data including bookmarks, passwords, history, cookies, and site data from their desktop.
To use the new Firefox, either wait for your browser to update by itself or grab the new software from the Firefox website. If you’re on Linux, your distribution vendor will push an update for Firefox within the next couple of days and it will become available in your update manager. You can view the full release notes for version 62.0 here.