Firefox 96 has already been released and these are its news

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Recientemente The new version of "Firefox 96" was officially released and in which the development team announced that Firefox 96 "significantly" reduces the load placed on the main browser thread and adds image encoder support for the WebP format to the Canvas API.

In addition to this work, the new version of Firefox also incorporates enhancements to the JavaScript WebRTC programming interface, an improved cookie policy to reduce the likelihood of CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks, fixes for video quality degradation, and other fixes.

Main new features of Firefox 96

Firefox 96 is the first update of 2022 and in which are included improvements in noise suppression, automatic gain control and echo cancellation. To update audio and video calls, Mozilla has worked on noise suppression and automatic gain control in the latest update.

On Android, users will get a new history highlight feature with Firefox 96, plus recently visited websites will be displayed.

It should be noted that this new version also focuses on reducing the workload on the main thread, this is intended to help the browser run faster on older, slower systems. Also, with the new update, Firefox will default to all cookies having an attribute SameSite=lax. Mozilla says this will help protect against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.

Also Firefox 96 comes with low memory detection on Linux by default. This detection is tied to the browser's automatic tab deletion feature.

When the browser detects that it is low on memory, it unloads unused tabs to free up resources. Still on Linux, Firefox 96 replaces the "Select All" keyboard shortcut with Ctrl + A instead of Alt + A. In previous versions, both keyboard shortcuts were available when selecting all text on a web page.

As for the WebRTC, this version of the browser will no longer downgrade screen share resolution during connections, an issue that affected some users in previous versions. Additionally, the Firefox Canvas API, which allows developers to draw graphics, now supports the image encoder for the WebP format. This allows Canvas elements to export content as WebP data using methods such as HTMLCanvasElement.toDataURL() and HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob().

Of the other key changes for developers are the following:

  • Firefox 96 comes with the SameSite=Lax cookie policy enabled by default. According to Mozilla, this "provides a strong first line of defense against CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks." Cookies sent from the same domain, but using different schemes, are now considered to come from different sites for the purposes of the SameSite cookie policy.
  • With respect to cascading style sheets, the color scheme allows an element to indicate which color-schem it can comfortably render in.

     

  • Additionally, the counter-reset property now supports the reversed() function to construct reverse CSS counters, intended to number elements in descending order. The reversed() function can be used with the list element counter to number ordered lists in reverse order.
  • Also, cookies are assumed to be implicitly set to SameSite=Laxo if the SameSite attribute is not specified, and cookies with SameSite=None require a secure context.
  • The canShare() API is now supported by Android, allowing code to check whether navigator.share() will succeed for particular targets.
  • Additionally, the Experimental Web Locks API is enabled by default, allowing web applications to run in multiple tabs or workers to coordinate resource usage.
  • At the DOM level, the IntersectionObserver() constructor now defaults to rootMargin if an empty string is passed in the associated parameter option, instead of throwing an exception.
  • In Firefox 96, the main thread load has also been reduced.

How to install the new version of Firefox 96 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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