Mozilla Firefox 108 Enters Public Beta Testing with WebMIDI Enabled by Default

Mozilla Firefox 108

With the Firefox 107 release hitting the streets earlier this week, Mozilla has promoted the next version of its open-source web browser, Firefox 108, to the beta channel for public testing.

Firefox 108 doesn’t look like a big update to Mozilla’s web browser, but it does bring a few interesting things, starting with WebMIDI support enabled by default. WebMIDI is an API designed to provide MIDI support in web browsers, making it easier for musicians to interact with music using the Web.

Firefox 108 also introduces support for importing maps that allow web pages to control the behavior of JavaScript imports by default, as well as support for proper color correction of images tagged with ICCv4 profiles.

Another interesting change is in the bookmarks toolbar as the default “Only show on New Tab” state has been improved to also work correctly for blank new tabs. Users will still be able to change the behavior of the bookmark toolbar using the toolbar context menu.

For web developers, Firefox 108 promises support for the height and width attributes in the <source> element when it’s used as a child of a <picture> element, enablement of trigonometric functions by default to allow the use of sin(), cos(), tan(), asin(), acos(), atan(), and atan2() functions within the calc() CSS function, as well as support for the style-src-elem, style-src-attr, script-src-elem and script-src-attr Content-Security-Policy HTTP header directives.

For add-on developers, Firefox 108 adds a warning when an extension is installed and its version number does not follow the recommended format. Of course, the upcoming Firefox release will also include several security and bug fixes for better performance and stability.

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 108 into the wild on December 13th, 2022. Until then, you can take the latest beta version for a test drive by downloading the binaries for 64-bit or 32-bit systems from the official website.

However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use it for any production work!

Last updated 1 year ago

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