The Firefox 97 web browser has been released. In addition, an update to the long-term support branch, 91.6.0, has been formed. The Firefox 98 branch has been moved to the beta testing stage and is scheduled for release on March 8th.
Main innovations:
- The 18 seasonal Colorway color themes offered in Firefox 94 and implemented as a built-in add-on for a limited time have expired. Users who intend to continue using Colorway themes can enable them in the addons manager (about:addons).
- In builds for the Linux platform, the ability to generate a PostScript document for printing has been removed (the ability to print on PostScript printers and save to PDF remains).
- Fixed build issues with Wayland 1.20 libraries.
- Fixed an issue where pinch-to-zoom stopped working on touchscreens after moving a tab to another window.
- The about:processes page on Linux has improved CPU load accuracy.
- Resolved display of sharp corners for windows in some user environments such as elementary OS 6.
- On the Windows 11 platform, support for a new scrollbar style has been added.
- On the macOS platform, loading of system fonts has been improved, which in some situations made it possible to open and switch to a new tab faster.
- In the version for the Android platform, the selection in the history of visiting recently opened sites is implemented. Improved display of images for recently added bookmarks on the home page. On the Android 12 platform, the problem with pasting links from the clipboard has been resolved.
- CSS constructs with types length and length-percentage allow the use of "cap" and "ic" units.
- Added support for the @scroll-timeline CSS rule and the animation-timeline CSS property, which allow animation timelines in the AnimationTimeline API to be tied to content scroll progress rather than time in minutes or seconds.
- The color-adjust CSS property has been renamed to print-color-adjust as required by the spec.
- CSS has support for cascading layers by default, defined with the @layer rule and imported with the @import CSS rule using the layer() function.
- Added the scrollbar-gutter CSS property to control how much screen space is reserved for the scrollbar. For example, when you don't want content to scroll, you can expand the output to take up the scrollbar area.
- Improved compatibility with the Marionette web framework (WebDriver).
- The AnimationFrameProvider API has been added to the DedicatedWorkerGlobalScope set, which allows you to use the requestAnimationFrame and cancelAnimationFrame methods in individual web workers.
- The AbortSignal.abort() and AbortController.abort() methods now have the ability to set the reason for aborting the signal, as well as to read the reason through the AbortSignal.reason property. The default reason is AbortError.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 97 fixes 42 vulnerabilities, of which 34 are marked as dangerous. 33 vulnerabilities (5 under CVE-2022-22764 and 29 under CVE-2022-0511) 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.
Firefox 98 Beta Changes:
- Behavior when downloading files has been changed - instead of being prompted before starting a download, files now start downloading automatically and can be opened at any time through the download progress panel or deleted directly from the downloads panel.
- Added new actions to the context menu shown when right-clicking on files in the download list. For example, using the "Always Open Similar Files" option, you can allow Firefox to automatically open a file after the download is complete in an application associated with the same file type on the system. You can also open the directory with the downloaded files, go to the page from which the download was initiated (not the download itself, but the download link), copy the link, remove the mention of the download from the browsing history and clear the list in the downloads panel.
- In order to optimize the browser launch process, the logic for launching add-ons that use the webRequest API has been changed. Only blocking webRequest calls will now cause add-ons to run during Firefox startup. WebRequests in non-blocking mode will be delayed until Firefox has finished starting up.
- Enabled support for the HTML tag " , which allows you to generate dialog boxes and components for interactive user interaction, such as closeable alerts and nested windows. The created windows can be controlled from the JavaScript code.
- Compatibility panel added to web developer tools. The panel displays indicators that warn you about possible problems with the CSS properties of the selected HTML element or the entire page, allowing you to determine incompatibilities with different browsers without separately testing the page in each browser.
Source: opennet.ru