The Firefox 99 web browser has been released. In addition, an update to the long-term support branch, 91.8.0, has been formed. The Firefox 100 branch has been moved into beta testing and is scheduled for release on May 3rd.
Key innovations in Firefox 99:
- Added support for native GTK context menus. The ability is enabled via the "widget.gtk.native-context-menus" setting in about:config.
- Added floating GTK scrollbars (a full scrollbar appears only when the mouse cursor is hovered, otherwise, with any mouse movement, a thin indicator line is shown, allowing you to understand the current offset on the page, but if the cursor does not move, the indicator disappears after a while). The feature is currently disabled by default, the widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled setting is provided in about:config to enable it.
- Strengthened sandbox isolation on the Linux platform: processes that provide web content processing are prohibited from accessing the X11 server.
- Fixed some issues that occurred when using Wayland. In particular, the problem with blocking threads has been fixed, pop-up window scaling has been adjusted, and the context menu has been enabled when checking spelling.
- The built-in PDF viewer provides support for searching with or without diacritics.
- Added hotkey "n" to ReaderMode to enable/disable Narrate mode.
- The version for the Android platform provides the ability to clear Cookies and stored local data selectively only for a specific domain. Fixed a crash that occurred after switching to the browser from another application, applying an update, or unlocking the device.
- The navigator.pdfViewerEnabled property has been added, with which a web application can determine whether the browser has a built-in ability to display PDF documents.
- Added support for the RTCPeerConnection.setConfiguration() method, which allows sites to adjust WebRTC settings depending on the network connection parameters, change the ICE server used for the connection and the applied data transfer policies.
- The Network Information API was disabled by default, through which it was possible to access information about the current connection (for example, type (cellular, bluetooth, ethernet, wifi) and speed). Previously, this API was only enabled for the Android platform.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 99 fixes 30 vulnerabilities, of which 9 are marked as dangerous. 24 vulnerabilities (21 summarized under CVE-2022-28288 and CVE-2022-28289) 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.
The beta release of Firefox 100 introduces the ability to use dictionaries for different languages ββat the same time when checking spelling. Linux and Windows have floating scrollbars enabled by default. The picture-in-picture mode provides subtitles when watching videos from YouTube, Prime Video and Netflix. The Web MIDI API is enabled, allowing a web application to interact with music devices connected to the user's computer with a MIDI interface (in Firefox 99, it can be enabled using the dom.webmidi.enabled setting in about: config).
Source: opennet.ru