Firefox 56.0 Is Ready Ahead Of The Big Quantum Update

The final Firefox 56.0 binaries have hit the mirrors ahead of its official announcement to come. Firefox 56.0 brings more improvements while Firefox 57 "Quantum" will be a huge update.

Firefox 56.0 has a variety of smaller updates, is the last release to support legacy add-ons before mandating WebExtensions, support for rel="preload" for preloading content, various developer API changes, and more. With Firefox 56, media is no longer auto-played when opened in a background tab.

Firefox 56.0 isn't too exciting for end-users, but Firefox 57 should be pretty darn exciting. In fact, Mozilla is referring to it as "Firefox Quantum" with this being the biggest release in the project's history. There are significant speed-ups with Firefox 56: to the extent that with one of their benchmarks, Firefox 57/Quantum is twice as fast as Firefox from last year. Firefox Quantum has better multi-threading, a Rust-written CSS engine, and other components borrowed from Servo.

More details on the Firefox 57 Beta here. Firefox 57 should be officially released by mid-November.

Those sticking to stable releases can grab Firefox 56.0 from Mozilla FTP.