In the previous release 18.11.1, you could flag the differences between a git repository and a Salesforce org or vice versa. However, it was not possible to view the detailed difference between the two. This feature is now supported in this release 18.12.1. Note that detailed diff view is currently supported for metadata api repository only. Diff view support for DX repository is coming in the upcoming releases.

Some of the large orgs with 20k+ metadata components used to take over 30 seconds to compare. This release introduced changes to our comparison algorithm which should make comparison significantly faster than it was before.