Recently the release was announced the new version from Firefox 81, which comes with some quite interesting changes focused on the user's environment, as well as improvements to the PDF file reader integrated into the browser.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, in this new version of Firefox 81 10 vulnerabilities have been corrected, of which 7 are marked as dangerous.
Main new features of Firefox 81
In this new version of the browser a new interface is proposed to preview before printing, which excels at opening in the current tab and replacing existing content (the previous preview interface led to the opening of a new window).
Tools for adjusting page layout and print settings have been moved from the top panel to the right, which also includes additional options like controlling whether headers and backgrounds are printed, and the ability to select a printer.
The integrated PDF document viewer interface has been modernized (icons have been replaced, a light background used for the toolbar). Added support for the AcroForm mechanism to fill in input forms and save the resulting PDF with user input data.
Additionally, the ability to pause audio and video playback was provided. in Firefox using special multimedia buttons on the keyboard or audio headphones without mouse clicks. Playback can also be controlled by sending commands using the MPRIS protocol and it is activated even if the screen is locked or if another program is active.
In addition to the basic light and dark masks, a new Alpenglow theme has been added with colored buttons, menus and windows.
For mobile devices with Adreno 5xx GPU, with the exception of Adreno 505 and 506, WebRender compositing engine is included, which is written in the Rust language and allows you to significantly increase the rendering speed and reduce the CPU load due to outsourcing the rendering operations of the page content to the GPU side, which are implemented via shaders run on the GPU.
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:
- New icons have been proposed for the Picture-in-Picture video view.
- Make sure the bookmarks bar with the most important sites is automatically enabled after importing external bookmarks into Firefox.
- Added the ability to view previously downloaded xml, svg and webp files in Firefox.
- Fixed issue with resetting default language to English after updating browsers with language pack installed.
- Added support for the "allow-downloads" flag in the element's sandbox attribute to block automatic downloads started from an iframe.
- Added support for non-standard content layout HTTP headers with filenames with spaces without quotes.
- For the visually impaired, improved support for screen readers and content playback control in HTML5 audio / video tags.
- The JavaScript debugger implements the correct definition of files in the TypeScript language and the selection of these files from the general list.
How to install the new version of Firefox 80 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.