Mozilla Firefox 70 Lands With Big Performance, Privacy, And Lockwise Updates

Before we get into the new features that are introduced with this release, let's first talk about the improvements that Mozilla has made to the existing rendering engine. For starters, the JavaScript Baseline Interpreter has been enhanced to better handle large codebases, which has resulted in an 8 percent improvement in page performance. 

In addition, Mozilla is further expanding WebRender availability to more Windows users, and results in a boost in performance for Intel GPUs at resolutions of 1920x1200 or lower. Finally, there have been some rather significant improvements to the Compositor, which allows for pages to load up to 22 percent faster while reducing video resource usage by 37 percent on macOS.

Moving on to feature additions, Mozilla is further upgrading its Enhanced Tracking Protection, which was first introduced in Firefox 69. Enhanced Tracking Protection is turned on by default in Firefox and blocks third-party tracking cookies across 2,500 tracking domains. Firefox 70 takes this one step further by including social tracking protection, which blocks cross-site tracking from popular social media destinations like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Mozilla makes the default setting for this feature "Balanced" which will still allow sites like Facebook to functional properly. Using a more aggressive setting, however, my break certain functionality.

Going one step further, Firefox 70 includes a reporting process that shows you how and what the browser has blocked during your online sessions (including tracker, crypto miners, and fingerprints). You can see how this works in the video above.

The Firefox Lockbox password manager, which is now called Lockwise, adds two new features. The first is a new secure password generator that saves to Lockwise and can be used across all Mozilla platforms (i.e. on Android and iOS). Secondly, the dashboard has been updated to allow you to easily manage all of your passwords and even see if one of your online accounts has been compromised by a breach.

You can download Mozilla Firefox 70.0 directly from within the browser, or by clicking the following link. You can also read the full release notes here.