The Firefox 106 web browser has been released. In addition, an update to the long-term support branch, 102.4.0, has been formed. The Firefox 107 branch has been moved to the beta testing stage and is scheduled for release on November 15th.
Key innovations in Firefox 106:
- The design of the browsing window in private mode has been redesigned so that it is more difficult to confuse it with normal mode. The private mode window is now displayed with a dark panel background, and in addition to a special icon, an explicit text explanation is also displayed.
- A Firefox View button has been added to the tab bar to make it easier to access previously viewed content. Clicking the button opens a service page with a list of recently closed tabs and an interface for viewing tabs on other devices. To simplify access to tabs on other user devices, a separate button is also placed next to the address bar.
- The Firefox View page also provides the ability to change the appearance of the browser using the built-in Colorways add-on, which offers an interface for choosing six color themes, for which three tint options are offered, affecting the choice of tone for the content area, panels, and tab switching bar. Color themes will be available until January 17th.
- The built-in PDF document viewer has an edit mode enabled by default that provides tools for drawing graphic labels (drawings with freehand lines) and attaching text comments. You can customize the color, line thickness and font size.
- For Linux systems with user environments based on the Wayland protocol, support for a control gesture is implemented that allows you to navigate to the past and next pages in the browsing history by sliding two fingers on the touchpad left or right.
- Support for text recognition on images has been added, which allows you to extract text from images posted on a web page and place the recognized text on the clipboard or read it to people with visual impairments using a speech synthesizer. Recognition is performed by selecting the item "Copy Text from Image" in the context menu shown when you right-click on the image. The function is currently only available on systems with macOS 10.15+ (using the VNRecognizeTextRequestRevision2 system API).
- Windows 10 and Windows 11 users have been given the option to pin private browsing windows to the panel.
- On the Windows platform, Firefox is now available as the default viewer for PDF documents.
- Significantly improved WebRTC support (libwebrtc library updated from version 86 to 103), including improved RTP performance, expanded provided statistics, reduced CPU load, increased compatibility with various services, and improved tools for providing screen access in environments based on the Wayland protocol .
- The Android version now shows synchronized tabs on the home page, new background images have been added to the Independent Voices collection, and bugs that cause crashes, such as selecting the time in a web form or opening about 30 tabs, have been fixed.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 106 fixes 8 vulnerabilities, of which 2 are marked as dangerous: CVE-2022-42927 (bypassing same-origin restrictions, allowing access to the redirect result) and CVE-2022-42928 (memory corruption in the JavaScript engine ). Three of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2022-42932, which are rated as Moderate, are caused by memory issues 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.
Source: opennet.ru