A few days ago, the release of the new version of Firefox 79 was presented , and along with the announcement, it was also revealed that the version of Firefox 68.11 for Android will be the last version in the branch, since at the beginning of August, it is planned to gradually transfer users to a new edition, developed with the codename Fenix ​​and tested under the name Firefox Preview.
Therefore, all the work done on Firefox 79 for Android was migrated to the Fenix ​​codebase . The new version uses the GeckoView engine, built on top of Firefox's Quantum technologies, and a set of Mozilla Android component libraries.
In addition to new features and bug fixes, Firefox 79 addresses 21 vulnerabilities, 15 of which are considered critical. Twelve of these vulnerabilities (compiled as CVE-2020-15659) are caused by memory issues such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues could lead to the execution of malicious code when opening specially crafted web pages.
As for the new features in this new version, we can find that the password manager has added the ability to export credentials in CSV format.
Another important change is the addition of a setting to enable based on the domain shown in the address bar ("Dynamic First-Party Isolation", where first-party and third-party inserts are determined based on the site's base domain).
We'll also find improvements to tracking protections that automatically block cookies used by third-party trackers. To track websites, Firefox now deletes cookies and internal data daily, based on Disconnect.me's tracker lists.
While laptops based on AMD chips running Windows 10 already have WebRender , on Linux, WebRender is still only enabled for Intel and AMD cards in nightly builds and is not compatible with NVIDIA cards. To force its inclusion in about:config, the " gfx.webrender.all" and "gfx.webrender.enabled" settings must be enabled .
For Wayland , due to stability issues, the use of the DMABUF mechanism for rendering video to textures is disabled by default. The variable "widget.wayland-dmabuf-video-textures.enabled" is included for inclusion in about:config.
Also noteworthy is the addition of new HTTP headers Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy (COEP) and Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy (COOP) to enable a special cross-origin isolation mode for secure use on the privileged operations page that can be used to carry out side-channel attacks such as Spectre.
The mode allows you to isolate the resources associated with the site domain in a separate process, separating them from resources downloaded from other domains.
And for WebAssembly it adds support for batch memory operations (for more efficient modeling of memcpy and memmove), multithreading (shared and atomic memory) and reference types (externref).
Finally, if you want to know more about it , you can check the details by going to the following link.
How to install the new version of Firefox 79 on Linux?
Users of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or any other Ubuntu derivative can install or upgrade to this new version using 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
Having done this, now you just need 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 users of Fedora or any other distribution derived from it:
sudo dnf install firefox
Finally, if you are an openSUSE user , you can take advantage of the community repositories, from which you can add the Mozilla repository to your system.
This can be done with a terminal and in it by typing:
su -
zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/ mozilla
zypper ref
zypper dup --from mozilla
For all other Linux distributions, you can download the binary packages from the following link.