The new version of Firefox 83 has already been released and in this new version several improvements have been made, of which they are compilation improvements, JavaScript engine, forwarding to https, privacy and much more.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, 31 vulnerabilities have been fixed, of which 14 are marked as dangerous 12 vulnerabilities (compiled for CVE-2020-26969 and CVE-2020-26968) are caused by memory problems such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.
These problems could potentially lead to the execution of malicious code when opening specially crafted pages.
Main new features of Firefox 83
By default, in this new branch of Firefox 83 a new JIT compiler was enabled, which was developed under the code name Warp, which will significantly simplify the JIT architecture, improve responsiveness, reduce page download time, and reduce memory consumption.
The performance of the JavaScript engine has been improved mainly by reducing internal type information tracked within the engine and using the intermediate code caching (CacheIR) technique, previously proposed in the bytecode interpreter, which occupies an intermediate niche between a regular interpreter and a pre-JIT compiler.
In the section "Privacy and security" in the settings, the "HTTPS only" mode is offeredWhen enabled, all requests made without encryption are automatically redirected to protected page variants. This mode can be enabled for all windows or only for windows open in private browsing mode.
Furthermore, a new web authentication dialog has been activated it does not block other tabs. The form for entering authentication parameters is now linked to a specific tab and does not block the entire interface.
Were added hot keys to rewind quickly the video displayed in picture-in-picture mode. To rewind forward and backward in 15 second increments, it is now sufficient to press the corresponding cursor keys.
The interface was improved displayed when you enable screen sharing during a video conference in Firefox. The interface is now more explicit about which devices and screens are shared.
The address bar now has the ability to quickly switch to another engine Search: The list of available search engine icons is now displayed at the bottom of the window even before the start of a query (previously, the list appeared only after entering the first letter of the query).
Furthermore, the "Tab-to-search" function is available, which allows pressing the key Tab in address bar switch to search mode with search engine choice active based on the characters entered, if one of the installed search engines is the one that offers autocomplete. For example, typing "ya" will return "yandex.ru", after which you can press Tab and the mode of writing a query in Yandex will be enabled.
The built-in PDF document viewer interface has been redesigned (icons have been replaced, a light background used for the toolbar).
For Apple devices shipped with macOS Big Sur and equipped with new Apple CPUs, the ability to use Firefox is provided by the Rosetta 2 binary translator. In the next releases, it is planned to provide native assemblies for the Apple M1 CPU. The macOS version also provides minimized window session recovery to reduce power consumption.
For Windows 7/8 / 8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.15 users, the WebRender compositing engine is enabled. Therefore, WebRender is now enabled for all versions of Windows and macOS (except 10.16 Beta).
For Linux, proprietary NVIDIA drivers remain on the block list for WebRender, as well as Intel drivers when using screen resolutions of 3440 × 1440 and higher.
Users of NVIDIA binary drivers on Linux who have manually enabled WebRender and are not using composition may experience regression, where the top half of the screen becomes a filled rectangle.
The problem can be solved by enabling composition or by exporting any of the following environment variables: MOZ_GTK_TITLEBAR_DECORATION = system (unfortunately includes the window title) or MOZ_X11_EGL = 1 (this option disables support for WebGL 2). You can also disable WebRender temporarily.
How to install the new version of Firefox 83 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
Finally if they are openSUSE usersThey can rely on community repositories, from which they can add Mozilla's to their 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
To all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.