Firefox 90 arrives with security improvements, says goodbye to FTP and more

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The launch of the new version of the popular web browser Firefox 90 in which some new functions have been added to the browser, most of which are focused on Windows.

In addition to the bug fixes of which 20 vulnerabilities have been fixed and of these 16 are marked as dangerous, 13 vulnerabilities (compiled for CVE-2021-29976 and CVE-2021-29977) are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.

Main new features of Firefox 90

In this new version of the browser SmartBlock implementation has been improved which is designed to solve problems on sites that arise from blocking external scripts in private browsing mode or by activating the enhanced blocking of unwanted content (strict). The new version includes adaptive blocking of Facebook widgets hosted on third party sites; By default, scripts are blocked, but blocking is disabled if the user is logged into a Facebook account.

Also It should be noted that in the "Privacy and security" configuration section, have been added additional settings for "HTTPS only" mode, In addition, an interface has been proposed to maintain an exclusion list, for sites from which it is still possible to use "http: //" without forced replacement with "https: //".

Work has been done to improve the performance of the representation of software in the composition system of webrender, which uses shaders to make a summary representation of elements on the page. For most systems with older video cards or problematic graphics drivers, the WebRender composition system has software rendering mode enabled.

Of the specific changes For the Windows version, it is mentioned that the builds ensure updates are applied in background even when Firefox is not running as it has been added a new service page, that provides information about third-party components not digitally signed by Mozilla or Microsoft, which can lead to compatibility issues and crashes.

Moreover, in Firefox 90 the complete removal of the built-in implementation of the FTP protocol is marked. 

Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:

  • When you save a page in PDF format ("Print to PDF" option), the document ensures that the working hyperlinks are saved.
  • The "Open image in a new tab" button in the context menu has been redesigned to open an image in the background tab (previously after clicking it would immediately go to a new tab with an image, but now the previous tab remains active).
  • Image resolution and internal size are now set based on EXIF ​​metadata, allowing proactive submission of lower quality stubs to speed up overall page rendering.
  • In web development tools, the Response panel provides a preview of downloaded fonts.

How to install the new version of Firefox 90 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.  


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