Firefox 55 Brings WebVR Support, Faster Search

Mozilla is getting on to the virtual reality bandwagon finally. The company has released Firefox 55 which brings support for WebVR for all its users. Firefox users with an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset will be able to experience VR content on the Web, moving forward.

With this, Mozilla claims that Firefox becomes the first browser to offer WebVR support to Windows users. Now, when using a Web game or app that supports VR on Firefox, you will find a VR Goggles icon visible on the webpage. You can then navigate and control VR experiences with handset controllers and your movements in physical space.

Firefox 55 also brings along the staple performance improvements, faster restoration of tabs, and more control over the new multi-process architecture. There's a new Performance panel that lets you decide how Firefox handles complex websites through the new multi-process architecture. You can now adjust the number of processes up or down in this version of Firefox by heading to the General section in Options.

"If you're running the 64-bit version of Windows, you might want to download and reinstall Firefox today. That's because new downloads on 64-bit Windows will install the 64-bit version of Firefox, which is much less prone to running out of memory and crashing. In our tests so far, the 64-bit version of Firefox reduces crashes by 39 percent on machines with 4GB of RAM. If you don't manually upgrade, no worries. We intend to automatically migrate 64-bit Windows users to 64-bit Firefox in our next release," Mozilla explains further on its blog.

Search has also been optimised to quickly let you search using many websites' search engines, right from the address bar. Just type your query, and then click which search engine you'd like to use. On default mode, you can search with Yahoo, Google, Bing, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, Twitter, and Wikipedia. However, these search engines are customisable in Settings.

Lastly but importantly, Firefox 55 is a recommended update because it fixes six critical security flaws, 11 high-severity flaws, seven moderate flaws, and six low-severity flaws. Firefox v55 has been rolled out to Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android users.