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Firefox 85

Available Firefox 85.

  • Graphics subsystem:
    • WebRender included on devices using the "GNOME+Wayland+Intel/AMD graphics card" bundle (excluding 4K displays, which are expected to be supported in Firefox 86). Also, WebRender included on devices that use graphics Iris Pro Graphics P580 (mobile Xeon E3 v5), which the developers forgot about, as well as on devices with Intel HD Graphics drivers version 23.20.16.4973 (this particular driver was blacklisted). On devices with AMD 8.56.1.15/16 WebRender driver disabled.
    • On systems using Wayland, established hardware video acceleration in VP8/VP9 formats.
    • Disabled mechanism advanced layers. Now this job is done by WebRender.
    • Temporarily disabled GPU acceleration of Canvas 2D causing artifacts on some resources.
  • Included network separation. Cache now (HTTP, images, favicons, connection pooling, CSS, DNS, HTTP authorization, Alt-Svc, speculative preconnections, fonts, HSTS, OCSP, Prefetch and Preconnect tags, CORS, etc.) stored separately for each domain. This will make it very difficult for large CDNs and ad networks to track users, which can analyze the presence of certain files in the browser cache and draw conclusions about the browsing history. Network sharing first appeared in Safari eight years ago (beginning with HTTP cache, then Apple gradually added other categories), and appeared in Chrome in late 2020. The inevitable price will be some increase in traffic (each resource will download content from the CDN, even if this content has already been downloaded by another resource) and download time, but according to Google, this value is extremely small (4% of traffic, download slowdown by 0.09-0.75% for most sites, 1.3% in the worst cases). Unfortunately, on the modern web there is no other way to deal with supercookies (add-ons like Decentraleyes cannot serve as an alternative, since they cover only a small part of the cache content listed above).
  • Now it is possible to show the bookmarks bar only on the new tab page (View β†’ Toolbars β†’ Bookmarks bar β†’ New tab only), and not on all pages. In addition, Firefox learned to remember the folder for adding bookmarks, and the bookmarks bar now displays the Other Bookmarks folder (browser.toolbars.bookmarks.showOtherBookmarks). After importing bookmarks from other browsers, the bookmarks bar will be enabled automatically in all tabs. Added by telemetry to measure the growth in the number of interactions with the bookmarks bar, the growth in the number of new users importing bookmarks, as well as the growth in the number of users disabling the bookmarks bar altogether.
  • Further improvements to the address bar:
    • In the search engine settings dialog added "Bookmarks", "History" and "Open Tabs", which allows you to assign short names to them.
    • Any of the search engines can now ΡΠΊΡ€Ρ‹Ρ‚ΡŒ from the address bar.
    • Added by setting, which allows you to not suggest search engines in search results (for example, since Firefox 83, when you type "bing" first thing offered switch to Bing search engine).
  • Appeared selective page printing (for example, not 1-5, but 1-3,5), and also printing multiple pages on one sheet. The functions are only available in the new print preview dialog, which is enabled by the print.tab_modal.enabled setting.
  • To the saved password manager added clearing all saved passwords (before that they had to be deleted one at a time).
  • Added the ability select home page and new tab page, even if an add-on that changes these pages is installed. Previously, the user only had choice between "reconcile" and "disable add-on".
  • Became possible display PID in tab tooltips (browser.tabs.tooltipsShowPid).
  • Maximum possible page scale increased from 300% to 500% to keep up with other browsers.
  • Address completion (when the user types a word in the address bar and presses Ctrl+Enter) now prefixes https:// rather than http://.
  • Updated Bing search engine logo. The search engine itself has been renamed to Microsoft Bing.
  • To avoid crashes, the maximum possible length of each link in the history is limited to 2000 characters.
  • The maximum allowable size of local storage (LocalStorage) that a particular web resource can use, increased from 5 to 25 megabytes. In Firefox 84, changes were made to the algorithm for calculating the amount of stored data, as a result of which it turned out that 5 megabytes was no longer enough for some websites. Since the developers plan to completely rewrite the code responsible for LocalStorage (LocalStorage NextGen) in the near future, it has been decided for now to simply increase the limit, rather than spend time fixing code that has very little time left to live.
  • Fixed the inability to restore several closed tabs if they were closed not by the user, but by an add-on (only the last of the closed tabs was restored, and not all).
  • Fixed hangup when downloading large files from the Mega file sharing service.
  • Eliminated An issue where Firefox installed as a Flatpak package could not open the localhost:port address.
  • The heuristic that tries to guess the correct file extension from the MIME type returned by the server is now makes exceptions for zip, json and xml formats (this created problems when loading files like .rwp and .t5script, which are essentially zip archives, but with a different extension). The heuristic is necessary because there are many misconfigured servers that serve files with the correct MIME type but the wrong extension, and just as many servers that serve files with the correct extension but the wrong MIME type (for example, in the case of . rwp (Train Simulator 2021 compressed directory) the server should not have signaled to the browser that it is a ZIP archive). Users, in turn, do not want to delve into the fact that an incorrectly configured server is to blame, and not the browser, so, for example, Chrome is forced to keep a huge list of MIME types in the code base to resolve such situations.
  • Fixed an error that resulted in an endless notification that a Captive Portal was found on the local network. When a user visited the firefox.com domain, the HSTS information was retrieved, causing the browser to now use HTTPS to connect to that domain. This, in turn, broke the mechanism for determining the Captive Portal (which checks the availability of the address http://detectportal.firefox.com over HTTP, because HTTPS requests are useless if Captive Portal is actually present).
  • Fixed inability to connect to domains on the local network by NetBIOS names.
  • Completely removed Flash support. Instead of elements ΠΈ that are of type x-shockwave-flash or x-test will display a transparent area.
  • discontinued support for Encrypted SNI (eSNI), used to encrypt the SNI field (contains the host name in HTTPS packet headers, is used to organize the operation of several HTTPS resources on one IP address, and is also used by providers for selective filtering of traffic and analysis of visited resources). Practice has shown that this does not provide proper confidentiality, since the domain name appears, for example, in the PSK (Pre-Shared Key) parameters when resuming the session, as well as in some other fields. It seems inexpedient to create analogs of eSNI for each of these fields. Standard proposed to replace eSNI ECH (Encrypted Client Hello), in which not individual fields are encrypted, but the entire ClientHello message (the network.dns.echconfig.enabled and network.dns.use_https_rr_as_altsvc settings are responsible for its inclusion).
  • discontinued support for search engines installed in the distribution directory or language pack directory. Such engines should not have remained after Firefox 78 (and if they did, then this is a clear mistake and should not be used).
  • Additions:
    • The "HTTPS only mode" setting value is now readable by add-ons so that add-ons like HTTPS Everywhere can disable some of their features that conflict with this mode.
    • Add-ons now have an API available browsingData (due to which add-ons can clear the data stored in the browser).
  • HTML:
    • Support included (loading content before it is explicitly requested by the browser).
    • Disabled element support .
  • CSS:
  • JavaScript: collation property can now be passed as an option to the constructor Intl.Colllator() (instead of let pinyin = new Intl.Collator(["zh-u-co-pinyin"]); you can write let pinyin = new Intl.Collator("zh", {collator: "pinyin"});).
  • Developer Tools:

Source: linux.org.ru