Mozilla recently announced the release of the new stable version of Firefox 92 , which comes with some new features, improvements, and above all, bug fixes.
Among the new features and improvements, we find, for example, support for AVIF images , which is enabled by default starting with version 92 of the browser . This is a new image format developed by the Alliance for Open Media, royalty-free and based on the royalty-free AV1 video codec. In this initial version, Firefox supports non-animated AVIF images.
Starting with this version, Firefox can display still images, with color space support for full and limited gamut colors , and image transformations for mirroring and rotation. Additionally, Firefox users and organizations can use the preference image.avif.compliance_strictness to adjust the degree of compliance with the specification, since the Firefox flag that determines whether AVIF is enabled or not, "image.avif.enabled", was set to false on the test system.
Another change that accompanies Firefox 92 is automatic HTTPS updates, as Mozilla continues its efforts to improve the handling of HTTP and HTTPS, after introducing an HTTPS-First policy for Firefox's incognito mode in Firefox 91 to automatically update from HTTP to HTTPS whenever possible, it incorporated support for the update.
The Alt-Svc header "allows a server to indicate that a particular resource should be loaded from a different server" while giving the user the impression that it is always loaded from the same server.
Another new feature in this version is that WebRender is enabled by default for all users, including those on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. WebRender is Mozilla's web page rendering engine designed to improve browser performance by allowing the GPU to handle web page rendering instead of the CPU. Only the iOS version of Firefox, limited to Apple's WebKit rendering engine, does not benefit. Therefore, when Firefox 93 is released, support for options to disable WebRender will be discontinued, and this engine will be mandatory.
Other notable changes in this new version include:
- Color level support for video playback on many systems
- Open alerts on tabs do not cause performance issues on other tabs using the same process
- Certificate error pages redesigned for a "better user experience"
- Mac: macOS sharing options can now be accessed from Firefox's File menu
- Mac: Support for images containing ICC v4 profiles is enabled
- Mac: VoiceOver correctly reports buttons and links marked "expanded"
- Mac: Bookmarks toolbar menus now follow Firefox visual styles.
- Access to the audio output device is protected by the speaker selection function policy
the default accepted HTTP header for images has been changed to image / avif, image / webp, * / * to support AVIF format.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the launch of Firefox 93 is scheduled for October 5 along with Firefox 78.15 ESR, which will be the last version of the 78.x branch to be compatible with versions 10.11 and higher of Adobe Flash and Mac Os X.
How to install the new version of Firefox 90 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.