Opera 66: The Sound of Silence

Firefox 66 is out, and provides with it a host of great new features such as screen sharing, scroll anchoring, autoplay blocking for audible media, plus initial support for the Touch Pub on macOS.

They are just highlights. For complete details, see:

Audible Autoplay Blocking

Starting with edition 66, Firefox will block audible autoplaying video clip and audio . This means mass media (audio and video) have to await user interaction before playing, except if the muted property is set on the linked HTMLMediaElement . Blocking can be disabled on a case-by-case basis in the site information overlay:

Screenshot of the Site Information panel displaying the 'Autoplay sound' permission Today you get to decide when to bother the sound associated with silence .

Notice: We’ re moving out blocking gradually to ensure that this doesn’ t break legitimate make use of cases. All Firefox users must have blocking enabled within a few days .

Usability Improvements

Scroll Anchoring

Firefox now implements scroll anchoring , which usually prevents slow-loading content from all of a sudden appearing and pushing visible articles off the page.

Contact Bar

The Contact Bar on macOS is now backed, offering quick access to common internet browser features without having to learn keyboard cutting corners.

Photo of Firefox's buttons on a Macbook-pro Touch Bar

Tab Search

Too many tabs? The flood menu sports a new option to sort through your open tabs and in order to the right one.

Screenshot of Firefox's tab flood menu showing a new 'Search Tabs' options Astute users will remember that clicking on “ Search Tabs” concentrates the Awesomebar and types the % sign in front of your query. Hence, while the menu entry makes tabs search much more discoverable, you can actually obtain the same effect by focusing the particular Awesomebar and manually typing the % sign or other modifier .

Extension Shortcuts

Talking about shortcuts, you can now manage and change all the shortcuts set by extensions by going to about: addons and clicking “ Control Extension Shortcuts” under the gear symbol on the Extensions overview page. Screenshot of Firefox's brand new settings page to manage keyboard cutting corners added by extensions

Better Protection Warnings

We’ ve completely remodeled Firefox’ s security warnings to better encourage safe searching practices (i. e., don’ big t ignore the warnings! )

Expanded CSS Features

Firefox is the first browser to back up animating the CSS Grid grid-template-rows plus grid-template-columns properties, as seen in the video below.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2019/03/grid.mp4

We’ re also the first browser to aid the overflow-inline plus overflow-block media concerns, which make it possible to apply designs based on whether (and how) stocked full content is available to the user. For instance , a digital billboard might report overflow-block: none , whilst an e-reader would match overflow-block: paged .

Furthermore, Firefox now facilitates:

New DOM APIs

The new getDisplayMedia API enables screen expressing on the Web similarly to how getUserMedia provides access to webcams. The particular resulting stream can be processed in your area or shared over the network along with WebRTC.   See Using the Screen Capture API on MDN for additional information. Screenshot of Firefox's screen sharing dialog

Mozilla is using getDisplayMedia in Bugzilla to permit people to get and attach screenshots to their bug reports, directly from within the browser.

Also, beginning with Firefox 66, InputEvent now has a read-only property, inputType . This distinguishes between many different types associated with edits that can happen inside an insight field, for example insertText versus insertFromPaste . To learn more, check out the documents (and live demo) on MDN .

Browser Internals

Lastly, we’ ve made a number of changes to how Firefox functions under the hood:

Through all of us at Mozilla, thank you for selecting Firefox!

Engineer with Mozilla Developer Relations, former Mozilla Personality developer.

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