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Firefox 39 bites four critical bugs

Set phasers to Frag, says Mozilla, in gaming roadmap for future browsers

The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox the 39th.

The best reason to adopt the new version is its repairs for three critical bugs. Detailed here, the flaws include memory corruption and “exploitable crashes.” A further two “high” severity flaws, half a dozen rated “moderate” and a single “low” severity bug have also been squashed.

On the positive side, the new release gains support for Unicode 8.0 skin tone emoji, better malware detection lookups during file downloads (on Mac OS X and Linux) and the ability to Share Hello URLs with social networks.

Mozilla's also signalled that future versions of its browser will get better at playing games.

The organisation's revealed a Games Technology Roadmap in which it promises to address the following issues in the name of a better in-browser gaming experience:

  • Allow developers to better exploit hardware parallelism.
  • Improve cold load time of large compiled codebases.
  • Improve browser storage capabilities, by making it easier to access more temporary storage, among other changes
  • Improve browser graphics capabilities.
  • Continue investment in performance across the platform, including with better WebAudio performance and efforts to reduce latency and jitter in the browser’s rendering pipeline
  • Continue investment in Emscripten.
  • Continue investment in Firefox developer tooling to better support game developers.

A few of the items listed sound like they could be useful for all sorts of things beyond gaming, such as even richer in-browser apps of any sort. This consumerism of IT thing may have some legs in it yet. ®

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