On the Mozilla Wiki, the Firefox 2016/17 Strategy and Roadmap was updated. This gives a preview of the emphasis that the browser will receive for development through the first quarter of 2017 and versions 48 through 51. A number of large changes are in store for the browser within this roadmap.
From the roadmap, we can see areas that Firefox will receive attention include:
- responsiveness
- reliability
- add-on discovery
- synced tabs sidebar
- activity stream
- recommendations on mobile
Responsiveness will be addressed by implementing a multi-process architecture within Firefox.
Beginning with Firefox 49, the browser will move to improve its reliability by dropping plug-ins except for Adobe Flash Player. Silverlight, Java, and other plug-ins will stop functioning at this time. This is a similar change that Google Chrome has made.
With a major update released every 6 weeks, it should be fairly predictable to watch Firefox development as these major changes move closer. You can also check them out in beta if you need to test them for enterprise compatibility in your environment.