Keeping to their normal rapid release schedule, Mozilla published v40 of the stable release of Firefox to the Play Store today. The biggest user-facing change in the update is one that was also present in the beta version of v40, allowing you to long press the forward or back buttons to see a list of your recently visited pages. Here's a quick look at how that works:

This is the sort of thing that only catches your attention when there aren't any other major changes, but this is one of those times. I don't think mobile browsers generally make going back very easy and sometimes the system back button isn't ideal when you plan to go back multiple pages.

The new malware protection in this build will present you with a hard-to-miss warning if you visit a site that hosts "deceptive software" according to Google's growing database of such programs. These are generally places peddling malware that masquerades as an app that you are familiar with and would trust.

The Safe Browsing API is a Google creation, though, so if you use Firefox for the purpose of avoiding sending all of your browsing information to Google, it can be easily disabled.

Here is the full changelog:

New:

  • Support for Android Presentation API for screen casting
  • Added protection against unwanted software downloads
  • Long press on back/forward navigation buttons in app menu to bring up history list

Changed:

HTML5:

Developer:

Fixed:

Source: Mozilla