The Firefox 96 web browser has been released. In addition, an update to the long-term support branch, 91.5.0, has been formed. The Firefox 97 branch has been moved to the beta testing stage and is scheduled for release on February 8th.
Main innovations:
- Added the ability to force the inclusion of dark or light theme for sites. The color design is changed by the browser and does not require support from the site, which allows sites that are available only in light colors to apply a dark theme, and on dark sites - a light one.
To change the color representation in the settings (about:preferences) in the "General / Language and Appearance" section, a new section "Colors" is proposed, in which you can enable color redefinition in relation to the color scheme of the operating system or assign colors manually.
- Significantly improved noise reduction and automatic audio gain control, as well as slightly improved echo cancellation.
- Significantly reduced load on the main thread of execution.
- A more restrictive restriction on the transfer of cookies between sites has been applied, which prohibits the processing of third-party cookies set when accessing sites other than the domain of the current page. Such cookies are used to track user movements between sites in the code of advertising networks, social network widgets and web analytics systems. Cookie transmission is controlled by the Same-Site attribute specified in the "Cookie Policy" header, which is now set to "Same-Site=Lax" by default, restricting the sending of Cookies for cross-site sub-requests, such as requesting an image or downloading content via an iframe from another site, which also provides protection against CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks.
- Fixed issues with reduced video quality on some sites and resetting the SSRC (Synchronization source identifier) ββheader when watching a video. We also fixed an issue with resolution reduction when sharing a screen via WebRTC.
- On macOS, following links in Gmail now opens them in a new tab, just like on other platforms. Due to unresolved issues, macOS does not allow you to unpin videos in full screen mode.
- To simplify the customization of dark theme styles, a new color-scheme CSS property has been added, which allows you to determine in which color schemes an element can be displayed correctly. Among the supported schemes are "light", "dark", "day mode" and "night mode".
- Added hwb() CSS function that can be used instead of color values ββto define colors according to the HWB (hue, whiteness, blackness) color model. Optionally, a transparency value can be specified in the function.
- The "reversed()" function has been implemented for the counter-reset CSS property, which allows using inverted CSS counters to number elements in descending order (for example, you can display element numbers in lists in descending order).
- The Android platform provides support for the navigator.canShare() method, which allows you to test the possibility of using the navigator.share() method, which provides facilities for sharing information in social networks, for example, allows you to generate a unified button for sharing in social networks used by the visitor, or organize sending data to other applications.
- The Web Locks API is enabled by default, allowing you to coordinate the work of a web application in several tabs or accessing resources from web workers. The API provides a means for acquiring locks asynchronously and releasing the locks when the necessary work on the shared resource is complete. While one process holds the lock, other processes wait for it to be released without stopping execution.
- In the IntersectionObserver() constructor, passing an empty string ensures that the rootMargin property is set by default instead of throwing an exception.
- Implemented the ability to export canvas elements in WebP format when calling the HTMLCanvasElement.toDataURL(), HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob(), and OffscreenCanvas.toBlob methods.
- Firefox 97 Beta marks a redesign of the file download process - instead of being prompted before downloading begins, files now start downloading automatically and can be opened at any time through the download progress panel.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 96 fixes 30 vulnerabilities, of which 19 are marked as dangerous. 14 vulnerabilities are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues can potentially lead to malicious code being executed when specially designed pages are opened. Dangerous issues also include bypassing Iframe isolation via XSLT, race conditions when playing sound files, buffer overflows when using the blendGaussianBlur CSS filter, accessing memory after it is freed when processing certain network requests, replacing the contents of the browser window through manipulations in full screen mode, blocking exit full screen mode.
Additionally, we can note the announcement of the cooperation between the Linux Mint distribution and Mozilla, within which the distribution will ship unmodified official builds of Firefox without applying additional patches from Debian and Ubuntu, without replacing the home page with linuxmint.com/start, without replacing search engines and without changing default settings. Instead of search engines Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, a set of Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay will be used. In return, Mozilla will transfer a certain amount of money to the developers of Linux Mint. New Firefox packages will be offered for Linux Mint 19.x, 20.x and 21.x branches. Today or tomorrow, users will be offered a package of Firefox 96, designed in accordance with the agreement.
Source: opennet.ru