Firefox 52 Kills Plugins, Adds WebAssembly And Warns Websites That Don’t Run HTTPS
This week, Mozilla has released the latest version of Firefox web browser, complete with some significant changes.
The latest Firefox has effectively killed all plugins with the exception of Flash. The browser will now only run Flash. Anything else reliant on the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) is now verboten. This all plugins including Acrobat, Java, Silverlight are gone for good.
Another notable feature is addition of WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a client-side scripting environment. Mozilla says WebAssembly “brings near-native performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of plugins”.
The third noteworthy change is that the browser will issue significant warnings when user visits web sites that do not run HTTPS. Mozilla warned us back in January, that it is going to warn users when they visit HTTP websites.
Finally, Firefox 52 also supports the “Strict Secure Cookies” specification. That effort prevents HTTP-only sites from delivering cookies with the “secure” attribute. That attribute denotes the cookie should only be transported over encrypted link, but it is still possible to access such cookies over HTTP under some circumstances. By adopting the new spec, only HTTPS servers can access cookies marked “secure”.
You can find the full change log for Firefox 52 by visiting the source link.