The release of the web browser Firefox 97 has taken place. Additionally, an update for the long-term support branch — 91.6.0 has been formed. The Firefox 98 branch has entered beta testing, with release scheduled for March 8.
Key innovations:
- The term of 18 seasonal Colorway themes offered in Firefox 94 and implemented as a limited-time add-on has expired. Users wishing to continue using the Colorway themes can enable them in the add-ons manager (about:addons).
- The ability to generate PostScript documents for printing has been removed in builds for the Linux platform (the capability to print on PostScript printers and save to PDF remains).
- Issues with the build with Wayland 1.20 libraries have been resolved.
- A problem causing pinch scaling to stop working on touch screens after moving a tab to another window has been fixed.
- The accuracy of CPU load determination on the about:processes page in Linux has been improved.
- The issue with sharp corners for windows in some user environments, such as elementary OS 6, has been resolved.
- Support for the new style of scrollbars has been added to the Windows 11 platform.
- On the macOS platform, the loading of system fonts has been improved, which in some cases has sped up the opening and switching to a new tab.
- The Android version has implemented the highlighting of recently opened sites in the browsing history. The home page has improved image display for recently added bookmarks. On Android 12, a problem with pasting links from the clipboard has been resolved.
- In CSS constructs with length and length-percentage types, the use of the 'cap' and 'ic' units is permitted.
- Support for the CSS @scroll-timeline rule and the CSS animation-timeline property has been added, allowing the animation timeline in the AnimationTimeline API to be linked to the scrolling of content rather than time in minutes or seconds.
- The CSS property color-adjust has been renamed to print-color-adjust, as required by the specification.
- Support for cascading layers defined using the @layer rule and imported via the @import CSS rule, using the layer() function, is enabled by default in CSS.
- The CSS property scrollbar-gutter has been added to manage the screen space reserved for the scrollbar. For instance, when scrolling content is not needed, it can expand the output and occupy the area of the scrollbar.
- Improved compatibility with the Marionette web framework (WebDriver).
- The DedicatedWorkerGlobalScope set has introduced the AnimationFrameProvider API, allowing the use of requestAnimationFrame and cancelAnimationFrame methods in separate web workers.
- The AbortSignal.abort() and AbortController.abort() methods now include the ability to set a reason for the signal's abort and to read that reason through the AbortSignal.reason property. By default, AbortError is specified as the reason.
In addition to new features and bug fixes in Firefox 97, 42 vulnerabilities were addressed, of which 34 are marked as critical. 33 vulnerabilities (5 under CVE-2022-22764 and 29 under CVE-2022-0511) were caused by memory-related issues, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues could potentially allow an attacker to execute code when specially crafted pages are opened.
Changes in the beta version of Firefox 98:
- File loading behavior has been changed — instead of prompting a request before starting, files now begin to load automatically and can be opened at any time through the download progress panel or deleted directly from the downloads panel.
- New actions have been added to the context menu that appears when right-clicking on files in the downloads list. For example, with the "Always Open Similar Files" option, users can allow Firefox to automatically open a file in the associated application after the download is complete. Users can also open the folder containing downloaded files, go to the page from which the download was initiated (not the download itself, but the link to it), copy the link, remove the download entry from the browsing history, and clear the list in the downloads panel.
- To optimize the browser startup process, the logic for loading extensions that use the webRequest API has been changed. Only blocking webRequest calls will cause extensions to load during Firefox's startup. Access to webRequest in non-blocking mode will be deferred until Firefox has finished starting.
- Support for the HTML tag
- A compatibility evaluation panel has been added to the web developer tools. The panel displays indicators warning of potential issues with the CSS properties of the selected HTML element or the entire page, allowing identification of incompatibilities across different browsers without needing to test the page separately in each browser.
Source: opennet.ru
