The Firefox 98 web browser has been released. In addition, an update to the long-term support branch, 91.7.0, has been formed. The Firefox 99 branch has been moved into beta testing and is scheduled for release on April 5th.
Main innovations:
- Changed behavior when downloading files - instead of displaying a prompt before starting the download, files now start downloading automatically, and a notification is shown in the panel when the download has begun. Through the panel, the user can at any time receive information about the download process, open the downloaded file during the download (the action will be performed after the download is completed) or delete the file. In the settings, it is possible to enable a prompt for each boot and define a default application for opening files of a certain type.
- 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.
- For some users, the default search engine has been changed. For example, in the tested English assembly, instead of Google, DuckDuckGo is now forcibly enabled by default. At the same time, Google remained among the search engines as an option and can be activated by default in the settings. As a reason for forcing a change in the default search engine, the inability to continue to supply handlers for some search engines due to the lack of official agreement (formal permission) is mentioned. The deal with Google to transfer search traffic lasted until August 2023 and brought in about $400 million a year, which is the majority of Mozilla's income.
- The default settings show a new section with experimental features that the user can test at their own risk. For example, for testing, the ability to cache the start page, SameSite=Lax and SameSite=None modes, CSS Masonry Layout, additional panels for web developers, setting Firefox 100 in the User-Agent header, global indicators to turn off the sound and microphone are available.
- 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.
- The implementation of the Custom Elements specification, which allows you to add your own HTML elements that extend the functionality of existing HTML tags, has added support for adding your own elements related to processing input forms.
- The hyphenate-character property has been added to CSS, which can be used to set the string used instead of the end-of-word character ("-").
- The navigator.registerProtocolHandler() method implements support for registering protocol handlers for the ftp, sftp, and ftps URL schemes.
- The HTMLElement.outerText property has been added, which returns the content inside the DOM node, like the HTMLElement.innerText property, but unlike the latter, when written, it does not replace the content inside the node, but the entire node.
- Disabled by default WebVR API, which is deprecated (set dom.vr.enabled=true to return to about:config).
- 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.
- Provided the ability to disable event listeners for a given DOM node. Disabling is done through a tooltip displayed when you hover the mouse over the event in the page inspection interface.
- Added "Ignore line" item to the edit mode context menu in the debugger to ignore the line during execution. The item is shown when setting the devtools.debugger.features.blackbox-lines=true option in about:config.
- The mode of automatic opening of developer tools for tabs opened via the window.open call is implemented (in the devtools.popups.debug mode, for pages for which developer tools are open, they will automatically be opened for all tabs opened from this page).
- The version for the Android platform provides the ability to change the background image on the home page and adds support for clearing cookies and site data for a single domain.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 98 fixes 16 vulnerabilities, of which 4 are marked as dangerous. 10 vulnerabilities (summarized under CVE-2022-0843) 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 99 beta added support for native GTK context menus, enabled GTK floating scrollbars, PDF viewer support for searching with or without diacritics, ReaderMode added hotkey "n" to toggle mode on/off reading aloud (Narrate).
Source: opennet.ru