The release of the Firefox 99 web browser has taken place. Additionally, an update for the long-term support branch—91.8.0—has been created. The Firefox 100 branch has entered beta testing, with its release scheduled for May 3.
Key features in Firefox 99:
- Support for native GTK context menus has been added. This feature can be enabled via the parameter 'widget.gtk.native-context-menus' in about:config.
- Floating GTK scrollbars have been introduced (the full scrollbar appears only when the mouse cursor is hovered over it; at all other times, a thin indicator line is shown, allowing users to see the current offset on the page, but if the cursor remains still, the indicator disappears after a while). This feature is currently disabled by default; to enable it, the setting widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled is available in about:config.
- Sandbox isolation has been strengthened on the Linux platform: processes responsible for handling web content are prohibited from accessing server X11.
- Several issues that occurred when using Wayland have been resolved. Specifically, a thread-blocking issue has been fixed, popup window scaling has been improved, and context menu functionality during spell-checking has been ensured.
- The built-in PDF viewer now supports searching with or without diacritical marks.
- A hotkey 'n' has been added in Reader Mode for toggling the text-to-speech reading mode (Narrate).
- The Android version now allows selective clearing of cookies and stored local data only for specific domain. A crash that occurred when switching to the browser from another application, applying updates, or unlocking the device has been fixed.
- A property navigator.pdfViewerEnabled has been added, which allows a web application to determine the presence of the built-in PDF document viewing capability in the browser.
- Support for the method RTCPeerConnection.setConfiguration() has been added, enabling websites to adjust WebRTC settings based on network connection parameters, change the ICE server used for connections, and apply data transmission policies.
- The API Network Information is disabled by default, which previously provided access to details about the current connection (such as type (cellular, bluetooth, ethernet, wifi) and speed). This API was previously enabled only for the Android platform.
In addition to new features and bug fixes in Firefox 99, 30 vulnerabilities have been addressed, 9 of which are labeled as critical. 24 vulnerabilities (21 categorized under CVE-2022-28288 and CVE-2022-28289) are related to memory handling issues, such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. These issues could potentially allow an attacker to execute code by opening specially crafted pages.
The beta release of Firefox 100 introduces the ability to use multiple dictionaries for different languages during spell checking. Floating scrollbars are enabled by default in Linux and Windows. The picture-in-picture mode now supports subtitle display while watching videos on YouTube, Prime Video, and Netflix. The Web MIDI API is enabled, allowing web applications to interact with MIDI-compatible musical devices connected to the user's computer (in Firefox 99 it can be enabled through the dom.webmidi.enabled setting in about:config).
Source: opennet.ru
