What’s New In Firefox 64 (And How To Get It)

This week, the Mozilla crowd dished out the latest version of its Firefox browser – Version 64. As you’d expect for a product at this release number, the focus is on refinement and incremental improvements rather than wholesale revisions of the user experience. Here are a few of the highlights.

Better Tab Management

You can now select multiple tabs at the same time. Hold down the Control key if you’re using Windows or Linux or Command on a Mac and click on the tabs you wish to select. You can then click and drag to move the tabs as a group either within a window or into a new window.

As well as being able to manage tabs more easily, you can also see which tabs are sucking the most juice from your computer. The new Task Manager page, found at about:performance, lets you see how much energy each open tab is using and lets you close tabs to conserve power. However, unlike Chromium-based browsers, you still can’t see CPU or memory usage. Perhaps we can expect that in Firefox 65.

Contextual Feature Recommender

One of the challenges when a new feature is added to any application is knowing when it might be of greatest value. Firefox has added a new “Contextual Feature Recommender” (CFR) that looks at what you’re doing and then suggests a better way of doing it. Although this is limited to US users at the moment – why that’s the case is a little befuddling – it can help make you become more efficient.

For example, if you open and use the same set of tabs a few times, you’ll get a prompt to try out the Pinned Tabs feature.

Easier Add-On Management

Browser add-ons are very handy but you can end up with a bunch of them cluttering up your toolbar. Now, when you right-click on an add-on toolbar button, there’s a new context menu so you can remove the add-on from your system.

Developers Get A Bunch Of New CSS And Webkit Features

According to the Mozilla 64 change-logdevs can now overlay up to three CSS grids at the same time in the CSS Grid Inspector and the Web Console’s command line will highlight JavaScript syntax.

There’s a new contrast ratio indicator available when hovering over elements in the Accessibility panel and fresh support for the new CSS scrollbar specification. WebVR comes to macOS.

Security Fixes

The Mozilla crowd fixed 11 security issues, three of which were ranked as critical and five ranked as being of high impact.

You can check out the full list here.

Where Can You Get Firefox 64?

Firefox 64 is available now from the Firefox homepage. Firefox 65 is expected in late January 2019.