Several days ago the release of the new version of Firefox 99 was announced, in which a series of improvements have been made and new features have been introduced, of which, for example, it stands out that this version brings GTK overlay scrollbars for a more modern look.
This means that the scrollbars they will now be slimmer by default and taller to allow you to manually drag them with the mouse cursor when hovering over them.
They also disappear after a second if no motion is detected. However, the GTK overlay scrollbars are not yet enabled by default, so for those who are interested in activating them, they should go to the Advanced Settings page by typing about:config in the address bar, looking for the option "widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled" and setting it to "True" after a double click.
Another change in Firefox 99 is that on Linux, access to the X Window System is limited (X11) for processes exposed to web content. Users using Firefox Snap should be satisfied with this new security feature.
As well for Linux, Firefox 99 adds initial support for the Web MIDI API, which requires a site-specific plugin to enable it on your web page. "Initial" means that there are some limitations, such as the fact that device hotplug detection is not currently in this version, although it should work on most web pages.
With regards to list of bugs fixed in firefox 99 provided by Mozilla, there are two that stood out among the rest:
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- fonts are often combined and minified to make their delivery from the server more efficient.
- The JavaScript that runs on a page is often machine generated, such as when it is compiled from a language like CoffeeScript or TypeScript.CVE-2022-28283: Missing security checks to get sourceMap URL: devtools' sourceMapURL function lacked security checks that would have allowed a web page to attempt to include local files or other files that should have been inaccessible. Firefox's SourceMap tool is not designed for everyday use; this is a useful feature for developers who want to dig into the JavaScript source code of a web page to see why it is misbehaving.
JavaScript sources executed by the browser are often transformed in some way from the original sources created by a developer. The error has been classified as "moderate".
- CVE-2022-28286: IFRAME content could display outside the border: Due to a layout change, the iframe content may have been displayed outside the border. This could have led to user confusion or phishing attacks.
Finally, it should be noted that currently the browser is available in a fix release "Firefox 99.0.1" which was recently released and fixes several bugs:
- Fixed an issue with moving items from the download panel with the mouse (regardless of which item was attempted to transfer, only the first item to transfer was selected).
- Resolved issues with Zoom using a link to zoom.us without specifying a subdomain.
- Fixed a Windows platform-specific bug that prevented video decoding hardware acceleration from working on systems with the new Intel drivers.
How to install the new version of Firefox 99 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.