Firefox 59 for developers

This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 59 that will affect developers. Firefox 59 was released on March 13, 2018.

Changes for web developers

Developer tools

HTML

  • The <textarea> element's autocomplete attribute has been implemented. This lets you enable or disable form auto-fill for the element.

CSS

SVG

No changes.

JavaScript

No changes.

APIs

New APIs

DOM

DOM events

Service workers

Media and WebRTC

  • The MediaStreamTrack property MediaStreamTrack.muted, along with the events mute and unmute and the corresponding event handlers, onmute and onunmute, have been implemented. A track's muted state indicates that the track is not currently able to provide media data.

    Note: The muted state of a track isn't useful for what's typically thought of as muting and unmuting a track. Instead, use the enabled property; setting enabled to false causes the track to output only empty frames.

  • Firefox 59 on Android now supports Apple's HTTPS Live Streaming (HLS) protocol for both audio and video. This non-standard protocol is being supported on mobile to improve compatibility with sites that require it for mobile streaming. There is not currently any plan to implement it on Firefox Desktop.
  • The RTCRtpReceiver methods getContributingSources() and getSynchronizationSources() have been implemented to provide information about the sources of each RTP stream. However, a specification change occurred before release and we have disabled these by default behind the preference media.peerconnection.rtpsourcesapi.enable (Firefox bug 1363667, Firefox bug 1430213, and Firefox bug 1433236.
  • The RTCRtpTransceiver interface has now been implemented, since the Firefox implementation of WebRTC now supports transceivers, with RTCPeerConnection and other interfaces updated to use them per the latest specification.
  • The RTCPeerConnection.addTransceiver() method has been added. In addition, the behavior of addTrack() has been updated to create a transceiver as required.
  • Support for WebVTT regions was implemented in Firefox 58 but disabled by default. They're now available by default (Firefox bug 1415805).
  • Firefox now supports WebVTT REGION definition blocks whose settings list has one setting per line instead of all of the settings being on the same line of the WebVTT file (Firefox bug 1415821.

Canvas and WebGL

No changes.

CSSOM

The CSSNamespaceRule interface and its namespaceURL and prefix properties have been implemented (Firefox bug 1326514).

HTTP

No changes.

Security

  • Top-level navigation to data: URLs has been blocked Firefox bug 1401895. See Blocking Top-Level Navigations to data URLs for Firefox 59 for more details.
  • The SAMEORIGIN directive of the X-Frame-Options header has been changed so that it checks not only the top-level IFrame is in the same origin, but all its ancestors as well (Firefox bug 725490).
  • Image resources loaded from different origins to the current document are no longer able to trigger HTTP authentication dialogs (Firefox bug 1423146).
  • HTTP authentication now uses utf-8 encoding for usernames and passwords (rather than ISO-8859-1) for parity with other browsers, and to avoid potential problems as described in Firefox bug 1419658.
  • Everyday the HSTS preload list is updated from Google. Normally this doesn't warrant a note, but in this release new TLDs were included, notably .app and .dev. While they are new TLDs developers might have used them for local development and be surprised by this change. Note that reserved TLDs should be used for local development instead.

Plugins

No changes.

Other

No changes.

Removals from the web platform

HTML

The non-standard version parameter of the <script> element's type attribute (e.g. type="application/javascript;version=1.8") has been removed (Firefox bug 1428745).

CSS

  • The proprietary mozmm <length> unit has been removed (Firefox bug 1416564).
  • The proprietary -moz-border-top-colors, -moz-border-right-colors, -moz-border-bottom-colors, and -moz-border-left-colors properties have been limited to usage in chrome code only (Firefox bug 1417200).

JavaScript

APIs

SVG

Support for SMIL's accessKey feature has been removed (Firefox bug 1423098).

Other

Support for the non-standard pcast: and feed: protocols has been removed from Firefox (Firefox bug 1420622).

Changes for add-on and Mozilla developers

WebExtensions

Older versions