The right extensions can greatly enhance your browser’s capabilities, but it’s important to choose carefully. Here are five that are worth a look.

Over the past seven months, Mozilla developers have been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, thety have worked on performance issues, both obvious and non-obvious. This newly released Firefox is called Project Quantum. This posting goes through the biggest changes to Firefox browser.

Firebug has been a phenomenal success over its 12-year lifespan. So it’s sad that Firebug is now reaching end-of-life in the Firefox browser, with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) soon. The good news is that all the capabilities of Firebug are now present in current Firefox Developer Tools. So the work pioneered by the Firebug community over the last 12 years lives on in Firefox Developer Tools.

Many people have switched to Chrome. It’s now time to give Firefox another chance. Mozilla seems to have found its groove and focus again — and it’s starting to show. Version 57 is the most important Firefox release in years. Mozilla has dubbed this release “Firefox Quantum.” Many of the updates in Quantum come from Mozilla’s experimental Servo browser and engine.

Is Firefox Quantum significantly better than Chrome? No. But they are on par again.

FASTER AND EVEN MORE MINIMALIST, FIREFOX QUANTUM MAKES CHROME LOOK OLD

 https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/firefox-quantum-hands-on-review/

Mozilla is aiming to leapfrog its competitor with Firefox Quantum, and update to the bones of Firefox that focuses on how browsers will work with future devices.

 Web browsing, and its perceived speed, is bottlenecked by three factors — your internet connection, your computer, and your browser.

 Firefox Quantum is the first web browser that actively taps into the power of your computer’s multi-core processor. Most browsers, like Chrome, aren’t coded with attention to multi-core chips. Smart resource allocation means Firefox Quantum is technically the quickest browser on the market

With today’s release of Firefox, we are the first browser to support WebAssembly. If you haven’t yet heard of WebAssembly, it’s an emerging standard inspired by our research to enable near-native performance for web applications.
This new standard will enable amazing video games and high-performance web apps for things like computer-aided design, video and image editing, and scientific visualization. 

WebAssembly runs entirely within the Web Platform. This means that developers can integrate WebAssembly libraries for CPU-intensive calculations (e.g. compression, face detection, physics) into existing web apps that use JavaScript for less intensive work.
Modern web apps are complex computer programs, with client and server code, much of it written in JavaScript. 

The idea is  to build a true virtual machine in the browser that would be capable of safely running both JavaScript and high-speed languages at near-native speeds. 

Interesting story:

During this five year journey hundreds of members of the wider Mozilla community came together with a shared vision to disrupt the app ecosystem with the power of the open web. 
This is the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the “transition” of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.

A lot of people put an awful lot of love and hard work into the Boot to Gecko project. It might not have matched up to the expectations imposed on it from the outside world.

Mozilla has a website add-on section that has thousands of useful add-ons in different categories. Some of these add-ons are useful for penetration testers and security analysts. These penetration testing add-ons helps in performing different kinds of attacks, and modify request headers direct from the browser. 

This article lists a few popular and interesting Firefox add-ons that are useful for penetration testers. These add-ons vary from information gathering tools to attacking tools. 

Today’s release completes Firefox’s transformation into a fully multi-process browser, running many simultaneous content processes in addition to a UI process and, on Windows, a special GPU process. 

It also improves stability, ensuring that a single content process crashing won’t take out all of your other tabs, nor the rest of the browser.
Firefox continues its rapid implementation of new WebExtension APIs. 

For example, the screenshot below shows the Chrome version of the Vue.js DevTools running in Firefox without any modifications.

The CSS clip-path property allows authors to define which parts of an element are visible. 

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/54.0/releasenotes/

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