A few days ago the launch of the new version of Firefox 88 was announced in which a number of improvements have been made not only for the browser, but also important support for Linux is added, as well as for the new HTTP / 3 protocol.
In addition to bug fixes and innovations, Firefox 88 has fixed 17 vulnerabilities, of which 9 are marked as dangerous, 5 vulnerabilities are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.
Main new features of Firefox 88
In this new version of the browser improvements to the PDF viewer continue and in this new installment is added support for input forms integrated in PDF that use JavaScript to provide an interactive user experience.
Another change that we can find in Firefox 88 is a new restriction on the intensity of the display of the request for permission to access the microphone and camera. These requests will not be shown if in the last 50 seconds the user has already provided access to the same device, for the same site and the same tab.
Regarding the changes for Linux, we can find that added support for touch panel scaling with Wayland based graphical environmentsIn addition, when Firefox is started in Xfce and KDE environments, the use of the WebRender composition engine is enabled.
Firefox 89 is expected to include WebRender for all other Linux users, including all versions of Mesa and systems with NVIDIA drivers (previously webRender was only enabled for GNOME with Intel and AMD drivers).
On the other hand, it is highlighted that in Firefox 88 It has begun with the inclusion in phases of the HTTP / 3 and QUIC protocols. Initially, support for HTTP / 3 will be activated for only a small percentage of users and if there are no unforeseen problems, it will be available to all at the end of May.
FTP support is disabled by default. The network.ftp.enabled setting is set to false by default, and the browserSettings.ftpProtocolEnabled extension setting is set to read-only. All code related to FTP will be removed in the next version.
The reason is the reduction of the risks of old attacks, with a history of vulnerability identification and maintenance problems, code with FTP support implementation. It also mentions the removal of protocols that do not support encryption, which are not protected against modification and interception of transit traffic during MITM attacks.
In web development tools, the network inspection panel has a switch between displaying HTTP responses in JSON format and unchanged, in which the responses are streamed over the network.
La default inclusion of support for AVIF image format (AV1 image format), which uses intra-frame compression technologies from the AV1 video encoding format, has been delayed until a later version. Firefox 89 also plans to offer an updated user interface and integrate a calculator into the address bar.
How to install the new version of Firefox 88 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.
Greetings, it works well for me, perfect, what I did not like was that they removed the ftp but well if it is for improvement.