The release of the web browser Firefox 96 has taken place. Additionally, an update of the long-term support branch 91.5.0 has been formulated. The Firefox 97 branch has entered beta testing, with the release scheduled for February 8.
Key innovations:
- A feature has been added to force dark or light theme settings for websites. The color scheme changes via the browser without requiring support from the website, allowing for a dark theme to be applied on sites that only support light tones, and a light theme on dark sites.
In the settings (about:preferences) under the 'General/Language and Appearance' section, a new 'Colors' section has been introduced, where you can enable color overriding based on the operating system's color scheme or manually assign colors.
- Significant improvements have been made in noise suppression and automatic volume adjustment, along with slight enhancements to echo cancellation.
- The load on the main execution thread has been significantly reduced.
- Stricter restrictions on cookie transmission between sites have been implemented, prohibiting the processing of third-party cookies set when accessing sites other than domain the current page. Such cookies are used to track user movements across sites in advertising network codes, social media widgets, and web analytics systems. To manage cookie transmission, the 'Cookie Policy' attribute indicated in the header has been set to 'Same-Site=Lax' by default, limiting cookie sending for cross-site subrequests, such as image requests or content loading via iframes from another site, which also provides protection against CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks.
- Issues with video quality degradation on some websites and the resetting of the SSRC (Synchronization Source Identifier) header while viewing videos have been resolved. Additionally, a problem with resolution reduction during screen sharing via WebRTC has also been fixed.
- On the macOS platform, clicking links in Gmail now opens them in a new tab, as on other platforms. Due to unresolved issues on macOS, detaching video in full-screen mode is prohibited.
- To simplify the setup of dark theme styles, a new CSS property color-scheme has been added, allowing you to specify which color schemes the element can be displayed in correctly. The supported schemes include 'light', 'dark', 'day mode', and 'night mode'.
- A CSS function hwb() has been added, which can be used instead of color values to define colors according to the HWB color model (hue, whiteness, blackness). Optionally, the function can specify a transparency value.
- The CSS property counter-reset now supports the 'reversed()' function, allowing the use of inverted CSS counters to number elements in descending order (for example, element numbers in <ol> lists can be displayed in descending order).
- On the Android platform, support for the navigator.canShare() method has been provided, allowing you to check the usability of the navigator.share() method, which offers means for sharing information on social networks. For instance, it can generate a unified button for posting on social networks that the visitor uses, or facilitate the transfer of data to other applications.
- The Web Locks API is enabled by default, allowing coordination of web application activities across multiple tabs or access to resources from web workers. The API provides means for obtaining locks asynchronously and releasing locks after completing necessary work with shared resources. While one process holds a lock, other processes wait for its release without halting execution.
- In the IntersectionObserver() constructor, when an empty string is passed, the rootMargin property defaults instead of generating an exception.
- It is now possible to export canvas elements in WebP format when calling the HTMLCanvasElement.toDataURL(), HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob(), and OffscreenCanvas.toBlob() methods.
- In the beta version of Firefox 97, improvements to the file upload process are noted — instead of prompting before the upload begins, files now start uploading automatically and can be opened at any time through the panel showing upload progress.
In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 96 addresses 30 vulnerabilities, 19 of which are deemed critical. Fourteen of these vulnerabilities arise from memory handling issues such as buffer overflows and accessing freed memory areas. These problems could potentially allow an attacker to execute code upon opening specially crafted pages. Among the critical issues are bypassing Iframe isolation via XSLT, a race condition when playing audio files, buffer overflow when using the CSS filter blendGaussianBlur, accessing memory after it has been freed while processing certain network requests, and content spoofing in the browser window through fullscreen manipulations, along with blocking the exit from fullscreen mode.
Additionally, it's noteworthy that a collaboration has been announced between the Linux Mint distribution and Mozilla, where the distribution will ship unaltered official builds of Firefox without applying any additional patches from Debian and Ubuntu, without replacing the homepage with linuxmint.com/start, without changing search engines, and without altering default settings. Instead of the search engines Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, a set consisting of Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ebay will be used. In return, Mozilla will provide Linux Mint developers with a certain monetary amount. New Firefox packages will be offered for the Linux Mint 19.x, 20.x, and 21.x branches. Users will be offered Firefox 96 packages today or tomorrow, formatted in accordance with the agreement.
Source: opennet.ru
