The release of the Firefox 126 web browser has taken place, and an update for the long-term support branch — 115.11.0 — has been formed. The Firefox 127 branch has entered the beta testing stage, with its release scheduled for June 11.
Key Features in Firefox 126:
- The context menu has been enhanced with the operation ‘Copy Link Without Site Tracking,’ allowing users to copy the URL of a selected link to the clipboard while stripping away the query parameters used for tracking site visits. For example, when copying a link, parameters like mc_eid and fbclid, which are used during transitions from Facebook pages, will be removed. Overall, more than 300 tracking parameters will be cut out, including those utilized by major online retailers.
- Support for content encoding using the Zstandard (zstd) compression algorithm has been added, in addition to the previously supported gzip, brotli, and deflate algorithms. When sending requests, Firefox now sets the ‘Content-encoding’ value in the HTTP header to ‘gzip, deflate, br, zstd.’ Major sites that support serving compressed data in zstd format include Facebook.
- An experimental feature for automated machine translation of text fragments highlighted on the page has been added (previously, only full page translation was supported). The translation function can be triggered via the context menu that appears when right-clicking on the highlighted text block. To enable fragment translation, a setting called browser.translations.select.enable has been added in about:config.
- The transmission of additional telemetry with aggregated search query counters from various categories has been implemented. These categories cover 20 generalized types of content, such as sports, business, and travel. It is claimed that the collected information is necessary for the development of new search capabilities. The data is stored without linking to individual users. To remove the user's IP address information, OHTTP (Oblivious-HTTP) technology is used, ensuring encrypted HTTP messages are routed through additional intermediate nodes. server the request is received not from the user's IP, but from the IP of a transit node.
- The recently introduced feature in Firefox 125 that allowed quick navigation to a link saved in the clipboard has been temporarily disabled. This feature automatically displayed the URL in the clipboard as a primary recommendation for navigation when clicking on the address bar. Performance issues have been cited as the reason for this decision.
- Hardware acceleration for AV1 video decoding is now enabled in macOS builds on Mac computers with M3 CPUs.
- A new method, URL.parse(), has been added, which returns a URL object representing the link specified in the parameters. Unlike the URL() constructor, this new method returns null in case of parsing issues instead of throwing an exception.
- Support for the CSS property zoom has been introduced, allowing for the scaling of individual elements. The level of scale applied to an element can be determined using the read-only property Element.currentCSSZoom.
- The ability to reflect the state of custom HTML elements in CSS through the pseudo-class ':state()' has been added. This functionality is implemented similarly to how standard HTML elements change their state based on user interaction.
- A new property, Selection.direction, has been added to define the direction of the selection.
- Added support for the Screen Wake Lock API, allowing web applications, such as media players, to prevent the screensaver from activating after a prolonged period of user inactivity.
- The IndexedDB API has introduced the IDBFactory.databases method for iterating through existing databases (returns an array of objects containing the names and versions of accessible databases).
- The Selection API now has experimental support for selection across shadow DOM boundaries. This can be enabled via dom.shadowdom.selection_across_boundary.enabled in about:config.
- An experimental function, shape(), has been added to CSS, allowing the creation of shapes using the CSS properties clip-path and offset-path. This can be enabled through layout.css.basic-shape-shape.enabled in about:config.
- The style editor in the web developer tools has been accelerated by 15-20%.
- A new setting, 'Show split console', has been added to the web developer tools, allowing users to enable/disable the mode that displays the web console alongside other panels.
- The Android version has resolved issues with the address bar panel display on devices with foldable screens. To unify with the desktop version, 'Add-ons' settings have been renamed to 'Extensions'.
In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 126 addresses 21 vulnerabilities. Two vulnerabilities are marked as critical. The first critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-4764) leads to access to a freed memory area when processing multiple audio WebRTC streams. The second critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-4367) allows for JavaScript code execution when handling specially crafted fonts in the built-in PDF viewer. An additional 9 vulnerabilities are due to memory management issues such as buffer overflows and accessing already freed memory areas. These issues could potentially allow an attacker to execute code when opening specially crafted pages.
Source: opennet.ru
