The end of legacy Firefox plugins is drawing closer, with Mozilla's Jorge Villalobos saying they'll be disabled in an upcoming nightly build of the browser's 57th edition.

While he didn't specify just how soon the dread date will arrive, Villalobos writes: “There should be no expectation of legacy add-on support on this or later versions”.

• Mozilla Firefox 55 Web Browser Is Now Available to Download, Here's What's New

  It's not yet official, but the Firefox 55.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

  Mozilla will make the release of Firefox 55 official on August 8, 2017, but you can get an early taste right now by downloading the binary or source packages for supported OSes from Mozilla's FTP servers if you can't wait to update your Firefox web browser through OTA updates.

  And it just happens that we got our hands on the preliminary release notes that were seeded on the Beta channel since Firefox 55 entered development on June 14, 2017. Thirteen RCs later and the final release of Firefox 55.0 is now ready to be savored on your favorite operating system.

• Firefox 55 Released, This Is What’s New

  Firefox 55 features a number of welcome improvements in memory usage and startup time, and offers 'search suggestions' in the URL bar.

• Firefox Is Better, For You. WebVR and new speedy features launching today in Firefox

  Perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern – we’re working furiously to make Firefox faster and better than ever. And today we’re shipping a new release that’s our best yet, one that introduces exciting, empowering new technologies for creators as well as improves the everyday experience for all Firefox users.

  [...]

  Are you a tab hoarder? As part of our Quantum Flow project to improve performance, we’ve significantly reduced the time it takes to start Firefox when restoring tabs from a previous session. Just how much faster are things now? Mozillian Dietrich Ayala ran an interesting experiment, comparing how long it takes to start various versions of Firefox with a whopping 1,691 tabs open. The end result? What used to take nearly eight minutes, now takes just 15 seconds.

• Mozilla’s new file-transfer service isn’t perfect, but it’s drop-dead easy

  Mozilla is testing a new service that makes it dead simple and quick for people to semi-securely share files with anyone on the Internet.

  Send, as the service is called, allows senders to encrypt any 1-gigabyte or less file and upload it to a Mozilla server. The service then creates a link with a long, complex string of letters in it that's required to download and decrypt the file. Mozilla will automatically delete the encrypted file as soon as it's downloaded or within 24 hours of being uploaded, even if no one has downloaded it.

• Firefox Nightly — How To Go Hands on with the Newer, Faster Firefox

• Chrome/Chromium Turns On Support For OpenType Variable Fonts

  Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser has now enabled support by default for OpenType Variable Fonts.

• The latest challenge to Google's AI dominance comes from an unlikely place -- Firefox

  Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox internet browser, has begun testing a feature that lets you enter a search query using your voice instead of typing it in. The move could help Mozilla's efforts to make Firefox more competitive with Google Chrome.

  If you're using Firefox in English on Mac, Windows or Linux, you can turn on the experimental "Voice Fill" feature and then use it on Google, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Support for other websites will come later.

  Alphabet's Google offers speech recognition on its search engine when accessed through Chrome on desktop -- it became available in 2013 -- and Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing and Google all let you run search queries with your voice on mobile devices. But searching with your voice on Google while using Firefox on the desktop, for example, has historically been impossible. Now Mozilla wants to make its desktop browser more competitive.

• Fedora 26 - Firefox Test Pilot send large files.

  This tool from Firefox team let you to send you upload and encrypt large files (up to 1GB) to share online.