Firefox 92 comes with AVIF and WebRender support for everyone

Recientemente Mozilla announced the release of the new stable version of Firefox 92 which comes with some new features, improvements and especially bug fixes.

Among the new functions and improvements we can find for example AVIF image support, which from this version 92 of the browser is enabled by default. This is a new image format developed by the Alliance for Open Media, royalty-free and based on the AV1 video codec, also royalty-free. In this initial release, Firefox supports non-animated AVIF images.

As of this version, Firefox can display still images, with color space support for full and limited gamut colors, and image transforms for mirroring and rotation, plus Firefox users and organizations can use the image.avif.compliance_strictness preference to adjust the degree of compliance with the specification, as 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 are the automatic HTTPS updates, As Mozilla continues its efforts to improve the handling of HTTP and HTTPS, after introducing an HTTPS-First policy for Firefox incognito mode in Firefox 91 to automatically update from HTTP to HTTPS whenever possible, it incorporated update support.

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 of this new version is that WebRender is enabled by default for all users, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. WebRender is Mozilla's web page rendering engine designed to improve browser performance by allowing the GPU to handle the display of web pages instead of the CPU. Only the iOS version of Firefox, limited to Apple's Webkit rendering engine, does not benefit. Therefore, when Firefox 93 starts, support for the options to disable WebRender will be discontinued and this engine will be required.

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

• 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?

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.