Mozilla releases Firefox 53 introduces Quantum Compositor and patches security vulnerabilities
Mozilla released its Firefox 53 update with a new browser engine and also patches 39 vulnerabilities in the browser. The new browser engine technology named Quantum Compositor in Firefox 53 is an effort to accelerate and improve the browsing experience to help reduce the number of browser crashes due to graphics issues.
With the Quantum Compositor, the graphics are rendered separately from the Firefox process. " The compositor determines what you see on your screen by flattening into one image all the layers of graphics that the browser computes, kind of like how Photoshop combines layers," Nick Nguyen, vice president for Firefox at Mozilla.
The Firefox 53 also introduces the two new interface themes. One is compact user interface with the default Firefox color scheme and other darker color scheme for night browsing.
In addition to browser improvements, a total of 39 security vulnerabilities were patched. Of these 39, seven was rated to be critical by Mozilla. One of the critical bugs deals with the memory safety, two dealt with out-of-bounds memory errors and a critical buffer overflow issues has been patched.
Other than these critical issues, it also patched three sandbox escape issues which were rated to be high impact. The Firefox sandbox is intended to restrict the ability of a process to access areas of system outside the sandbox.
A long awaited update was released by Mozilla and hope this update will reduce the browser crashes the Firefox was facing.
Some of the most popular Flash extensions were providing this capability before it became part of the browser. Since these extensions are now obsolete, they will likely no longer be supported by developers and will no longer work.
In October 2018, all legacy add-ons will be disabled on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Once this happens, users will no longer be able to find legacy add-ons on AMO.