Firefox 85 arrives saying goodbye to Flash and with various improvements

The new version of the popular web browser Firefox 85 has already been released and in this new version there are several important changes of which the elimination of Flash support stands out, as well as improvements against user tracking, improvements to the password manager and more.

Also of innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 85 has fixed 33 vulnerabilities, of which 25 are marked as dangerous. 23 vulnerabilities (compiled for CVE-2021-23964 and CVE-2021-23965) are caused by memory problems such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.

Main new features of Firefox 85

In this new version of Firefox 85 on Linux, the WebRender composition engine is enabled by default for a GNOME user environment session that uses the Wayland protocol. In a previous release, WebRender support was enabled for GNOME in the X11 environment. The use of WebRender on Linux is still limited to AMD and Intel graphics cardsas there are unresolved issues when working on systems with the NVIDIA proprietary driver and the free Noveau driver.

Another change that stands out is that provided the ability to disable plugins that override the homepage and the new tab screen without disabling the entire plugin.

In addition, it is noted that in Firefox 85 support for the Adobe Flash plugin was removed, this after Adobe officially completed support for Flash technology on December 31, 2020.

En particular, in addition to the url, an anchor has been added to the main domain from which the main page opens, limiting cache scope for motion tracking scripts to current site only (the iframe script won't) be able to check if the resource was loaded from another site).

As well the simplified interface for saving bookmarks on sites and accessing bookmarks is highlighted. On the page to open a new tab, the bookmarks bar is on by default. By default, it is suggested to save bookmarks in the bookmarks bar and not in the "Other bookmarks" section.

For the password manager it offers the possibility to delete all the filtered accounts at once, without having to separately delete each item displayed in the list. The function is available through the context menu «…».

Instead of the ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication) mechanism for encrypting information about the parameters of TLS sessions, such as the requested domain name, support for the ECH (Encrypted Hello Client) specification has been implemented and continues to develop of ESNI and is in the draft stage claiming to be an IETF standard.

Finally Firefox 86 has entered beta testing and this version stands out for the default inclusion of support for the AVIF image format (AV1 Image Format), which uses intra-frame compression technologies of the AV1 video encoding format. Added the ability to view local HTML pages in reader mode.

The launch is scheduled for February 23.

How to install the new version of Firefox 85 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

For all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.