Firefox is a popular web browser
Recently, the news of the new version release of the popular web browser «Firefox 116“, along with which Firefox Long Term Support branch updates 115.1.0 and 102.14.0 were formed.
In addition to the innovations in this new version of Firefox 116 19 vulnerabilities have been fixed, which 14 vulnerabilities are marked as dangerous, of which 11 vulnerabilities are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These problems can potentially lead to the execution of malicious code when specially crafted pages are opened.
Main new features of Firefox 116
In this new version of Firefox 116 that is presented, the new button to quickly activate the sidebar, in which, simultaneously with viewing a web page, you can access bookmarks, browsing history and tabs from other devices. The sidebar context menu has an option to move to the left side of the screen or close the panel.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is the deletion of the “about:performance” service page, which allowed monitoring the CPU load and memory consumption created by processing multiple pages. Attempting to open this page now redirects to a similar "about:processes" interface, which is considered more convenient and provides more information. For example, the page not only displays page titles, but also links tabs and subresources to domains, and provides information about resource consumption by background service processes.
In addition to this, it also highlights the ability to create builds that support working only on Wayland or only X11. In the first case, you should use the build target cairo-gtk3-wayland-only, and in the second case, cairo-gtk3-x11-only. Previously, when building for Wayland, dependencies for X11 were also included.
We can also find in this new version of Firefox 116 that a link to release notes page in the tooltip that reports a browser version update (Displays only on builds with English locale.)
On the other hand, it highlights the new audio output device API to allow sites to redirect audio from media (video, audio) to an audio device (such as speakers) that is not selected by default on the system. For example, a web conferencing site might route audio to external speakers or headphones.
Added support for web development tools to include native output formatters that allow sites to define scripts to more efficiently display objects or specific functions in various developer interfaces. By default, formatter loading is disabled.
Android version resolves content scaling and reloading issues that occur when working with some sites, as well as fixed a bug that caused problems when selecting the option to open links in a third-party application if Firefox was not selected as the default browser.
Of the other changes highlights of this new release:
- Support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 and macOS 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14 operating systems has been discontinued.
- Significantly improved the performance of sending data from the browser over HTTP/2, especially on high-speed networks with high latency.
- Added the ability to use dmabuf/VA-API on X11-only builds. EGL is included with Linux as the default OpenGL backend.
- The ability to transfer files from the operating system to the browser via the clipboard has been implemented.
- In the window for viewing video in Picture-in-Picture mode, a slider has been added to control the volume.
- Added the ability to edit existing text annotations.
- The Ctrl+Shift+T keyboard shortcut has been extended, which now returns the last closed tab or the last closed window and, if there is none, restores the previous session.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.
How to install the new version of Firefox 116 on Linux?
Ubuntu users, Linux Mint or some other derivative of Ubuntu, They can install or update to this new version with the help of the browser's PPA.
This can be added to the system by opening a terminal and executing the following command in it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa -y
sudo apt-get update
Done this now they just have to install with:
sudo apt install firefox
For Arch Linux users and derivatives, just run in a terminal:
sudo pacman -S firefox
Now for those who are Fedora users or any other distribution derived from it:
sudo dnf install firefox
For all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.