Firefox 44 Arrives With Push Notifications

Mozilla has added push notifications and new developer tools to the latest version of its web browser, Firefox 44, and removed RC4 encryption.

Push notifications, called Web Push, allows the system to receive notifications from approved websites, even without having that website open. Such alerts can include weather, emails, incoming WebRTC calls and instant messages. All such permissions are revocable.

Push Notifications

It should be noted that Firefox is not the first to offer push notifications, as Google Chrome began offering this back in April last year with Chrome 42.

Other developments with Firefox 44 includes the fact that the RC4 cipher is no longer supported over HTTPS connections. RC4 has been around since 1987, but multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered with it and there are concerns it is too easy to crack.

Developers meanwhile have been catered for with the inclusion of new visual editing tools and memory management tools.

Mozilla has been very busy lately adding more functionality to the Firefox browser.

Firefox 42 released in November for example introduced private browsing, called ‘tracking Protection’, that provides users with control over what data is sent to third parties. And last month Mozilla released a 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows for the first time.

Mozilla also recently announced it was halting the development of Firefox OS, its open web-based operating system, for smartphones.

The platform is not dead however, with the non-profit organisation switching its focus to areas like the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected TVs.

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