Software Update: Mozilla Firefox 26.0 Beta

Mozilla is developing version 26 of its Firefox web browser and the third beta release has already appeared. In version 26, which should be released on December 10th, if all goes well, content playback via all plugins except recent Flash Player versions must first be confirmed with a mouse click. Furthermore, the password manager has been improved, there is support for h.264 on Linux and pages load a little faster because images that are not on display are no longer loaded. Below is the provisionally incomplete overview of the improvements that we can expect in version 26.

New

• All plug-ins, with the exception of recent Flash plug-ins, are defaulted to ‘click to play’
• Password manager now supports script-generated password fields
• Updates can now be performed by Windows users without write permissions to Firefox install directory (requires Mozilla Maintenance Service)
• Support for H.264 on Linux if the appropriate gstreamer plug-ins are installed

Changed

• Support for MP3 decoding on Windows XP, completing MP3 support across Windows OS versions
• CSP implementation now supports multiple policies, including the case of both an enforced and Report-Only policy, per the spec

Developer

• Social API now supports Social Bookmarking for multiple providers through its SocialMarks functionality (see MDN docs)
• There is no longer a prompt when websites use appcache
• Support for the CSS image orientation property
• New App Manager allows you to deploy and debug HTML5 webapps on Firefox OS phones and the Firefox OS Simulator
• IndexedDB can now be used as a “optimistic” storage area so it doesn’t require any prompts and data is stored in a pool with LRU eviction policy, in short temporary storage

Fixed

• When displaying a standalone image, Firefox matches the EXIF ​​orientation information contained within the JPEG image (298619)
• Improved page load times due to no longer decoding images that aren’t visible (847223)
• AudioToolbox MP3 backend for OSX (914479)

The following downloads are available:
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for Windows (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for Linux (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for OS X (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 Beta for Windows (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 Beta for Linux (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 Beta for OS X (English)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for Windows (Frisian)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for Linux (Frisian)
Mozilla Firefox 26.0 beta for OS X (Frisian)