Software Update: Mozilla Firefox 38.0 Beta

As we are used to from Mozilla, the first beta release of the next version has already appeared shortly after the release of a stable version of the Firefox web browser. In version 38, which will be available on May 12 if all goes well, it is among other things possible to save links to articles for a later moment. Furthermore, the settings menu has been refreshed and now works with tabs, and there is support for Ruby, which is used in Japan to indicate how certain text should be pronounced. Below is an incomplete overview of the improvements that we can expect in version 38.

New

• New tab-based Preferences
• Share the active tab or window in a Hello conversation – enabled for first half of the beta cycle
• Keep track of articles and blog posts with the Reading List – enabled for the first half of the beta cycle
• Ruby annotation support
• Base for the next ESR release.

Changed

• autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields
• URL parser avoids doing percent encoding when setting the Fragment part of the URL, and percent decoding when getting the Fragment in line with the URL spec
• RegExp.prototype.source now returns “(?:)” instead of the empty string for empty regular expressions
• Page load times improved by speculative connection warmup

HTML5

• WebSocket now available in Web Workers
• Implemented srcset attribute and element for responsive images
• Implemented DOM3 Events KeyboardEvent.code
• BroadcastChannel API implemented (more at hacks.mozilla.org†
• Mac OS X: Implemented a subset of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) API to allow native HTML5 playback on YouTube
• Implemented Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) API to support encrypted HTML5 video/audio playback
• Automatically download Adobe Primetime Content Decryption Module (CDM) for DRM playback through EME

Developer

• Optimized-out variables are now visible in Debugger UI
• XMLHttpRequest logs in the web console are now visually labeled and can be filtered separately from regular network requests
• copy command added to console
• WebRTC now has multistream and renegotiation support

Known Issues

• Automatic update to RTL languages ​​( Persian – fa, Hebrew – he and Arabic – ar) are disabled until bug 1150021 is fixed

The following downloads are available:
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for Windows (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for Linux (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for OS X (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for Windows (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 Beta for Linux (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 Beta for OS X (English)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for Windows (Frisian)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for Linux (Frisian)
Mozilla Firefox 38.0 beta for OS X (Frisian)