Mozilla recently announced the availability of Firefox 95, version that lhereby as with main novelty RLBox, which is implemented by default for everyone.
RLBox is a new technology that hardens Firefox against potential security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries. RLBox lets you quickly convert browser components to work in isolation in a WebAssembly sandbox (wasm).
Instead of converting the code into a separate process, Firefox compiles it into WebAssembly and then compile that WebAssembly into native code. This does not require you to send .wasm files to Firefox, because the WebAssembly step is just an intermediate representation in your build process.
However, the transformation imposes two key constraints on the target code *: You cannot access unexpected parts of the rest of the program, and you cannot access memory outside of a specific region. Together, these constraints allow an address space (including battery) is securely shared between trusted code and untrusted code, allowing them to run in much the same process as Firefox did before. This, in turn, makes the application easier without major refactoring: the developer only has to clean up the values coming from the sandbox (as they could be created maliciously), a task that RLBox facilitates with a layer of contamination.
As for how it will benefit Firefox, Mozilla says:
"RLBox is a huge asset to us on several fronts: it protects our users from accidental defects and supply chain attacks, and it reduces the need for us to rush when such issues are reported upstream."
Another improvement that has been made is that it also have reduced the power consumption of software-decoded video in macOS, especially in full screen. This includes streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Mozilla adds that the launch of Firefox on Mac is now faster.
Also, Now you can move the Picture in Picture toggle button to the opposite side of the video, video overlay (picture in picture, PiP) allows you to detach a video from a web page and transfer it to a floating window, always in the foreground, so that the video can be seen while you continue working on it.
It is also highlighted that Work continued to improve support for the Wayland protocol. The Wayland port of Firefox has been brought to general parity in functionality with the X11 build when running in the GNOME environment.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Firefox can now be downloaded from the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11.
- Firefox now uses less CPU power on macOS.
Finally, it should be noted that Mozilla not only increases security with the new RLBox technology, since as It is usual, there were many security fixes in relation to the previous version, which has now been removed with the update to version 95. Six of these vulnerabilities are rated "high" by Mozilla, which means high risk.
How to install the new version of Firefox 95 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
To all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.