Mozilla today launched the latest update to its Firefox browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The highlight of this release cycle is the addition of web-based push notifications to its desktop browser.
Firefox already supported a different type of web notifications before, but to see those, you had to have a site open at all times. These new push notifications — which will look just like native notifications — work more like mobile notifications. They’re opt-in and you’ll be able to manage them in Firefox’s Control Center.
As Mozilla rightly notes, this feature is especially useful for “websites like email, weather, social networks and shopping, which you might check frequently for updates.”
It’s worth noting that Google already implemented these notifications last year and Facebook, for example, quickly adopted it.
If you’re a developer and want to get started with push notifications in Firefox, Mozilla also today posted a more detailed breakdown of how to implement this.
While this improved push notifications support is clearly the most visible feature in this release, the team also made a number of other changes to the browser — and especially to the built-in developer tools. You can find the full release notes for the desktop version here and the Android notes are here.