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Firefox 62 Arrives With Variable Fonts, Automatic Dark Theme on macOS, and Better Scrolling on Android (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shiny-new-features dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today released Firefox 62 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004." Version 62 brings variable fonts, automatic dark theme on macOS, and better scrolling on Android. Firefox 62 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. The latest iOS version is available on Apple's App Store.

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Variable fonts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Variable fonts are like TTF or OTF fonts where you can package all of the different styles in one font to load.

    Previously this was not possible and required packaging each font into separate files. For example, if you wanted the bold/italic variants of a font, you would need to load them all separately.

    This is actually a noteworthy performance improvement for web designers if they start utilizing it. I'm not certain if other browsers even support this yet.

  2. Re:Variable fonts? by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm going to post a stupid question and then go read what it is, so here it goes:

    Haven't browsers had variable fonts since the introduction of CSS?

    This is something different:

    Variable fonts are an extension to the OpenType specification, which allows a single font file to store a continuous range of design variants.