What’s New in Firefox 38?

Disclaimer: This article was originally published by me on SitePoint.com It is NOT licensed under a Creative Commons license and the rights exclusively belong to SitePoint. This is an excerpt and you can check out the full article on SitePoint

Like clockwork, six weeks after releasing Firefox 37, Mozilla has released Firefox 38, which includes some impressive new features that will keep lovers of the bleeding edge happy. However, it also comes with a bitter pill for some, in the form of digital rights management integration.

Let’s look at some of what’s in the bag.

Responsive Image Support

Firefox 38 now supports both the picture element and srcset attribute on images—joining Chrome and Opera.

However, there’s still one bug left for Firefox to address with this. Responsive images will load using the correct media queries, but currently don’t respond to viewport resizing.The bug is currently being worked on and should be fixed soon.

Web Workers and WebSockets

Firefox 38 now allows code running in a Web Worker to open up a WebSocket connection. This is great for games or other collaborative applications, which can now do their multiplayer/realtime logic in a separate thread from the UI.

Options Panel Redesign

The redesigned Options panel is now default for version 38. (Prior to this, it was only possible to activate it by changing its settings in about:config).

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