The release of the web browser Firefox 105 has taken place. Additionally, an update for the long-term support branch — 102.3.0 — has been formed. The Firefox 106 branch has entered the beta testing stage, with a release scheduled for October 18.
Key innovations in Firefox 105:
- A new option has been added to the print preview dialog to print only the current page.
- Support for sectioned Service Workers in iframe blocks loaded from third-party sites has been implemented (a Service Worker can be registered in a third-party iframe and will be isolated to domain, from which this iframe is loaded).
- On the Windows platform, the ability to use a two-finger swipe gesture left or right on the touchpad for navigation through the browsing history has been realized.
- Compatibility with the User Timing Level 3 specification has been ensured, defining an API for developers to measure the performance of their web applications. In the new version, additional arguments have been implemented in the methods performance.mark and performance.measure for setting custom start/end times, durations, and attached data.
- Optimization of the methods array.includes and array.indexOf has been conducted using SIMD instructions, which has doubled the search performance in large lists.
- In Linux, the likelihood of Firefox exhausting all available memory during operation has been reduced, and performance has been enhanced when free memory is scarce.
- Significantly improved stability has been achieved on the Windows platform under conditions of memory shortage in the system.
- The OffscreenCanvas API has been added, allowing canvas elements to be drawn in a buffer in a separate thread, independent of the DOM. The OffscreenCanvas can be used in both Window and Web Worker contexts, and font support has been provided.
- The APIs TextEncoderStream and TextDecoderStream have been added, streamlining the conversion of binary data streams to text and vice versa.
- For content scripts defined in extensions, the parameter RegisteredContentScript.persistAcrossSessions has been implemented, allowing the creation of persistent scripts that retain state across sessions.
- In the Android version, the interface has been switched to use the default font provided by Android. Opening tabs from Firefox on other devices has been implemented.
In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 105 addresses 13 vulnerabilities, 9 of which are marked as critical (7 under CVE-2022-40962), caused by memory handling issues such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues could potentially lead to the execution of malicious code when opening specially crafted pages.
In the beta version of Firefox 106, the built-in PDF viewer now includes the ability to draw graphical annotations (hand-drawn lines) and attach text comments by default. Support for WebRTC has significantly improved (the libwebrtc library has been updated from version 86 to 103), including enhanced RTP performance and better tools for screen sharing in Wayland-based environments.
Source: opennet.ru
