Firefox is a popular web browser
Mozilla released the news that the new version of your web browser «Firefox 122» It has already been released and in Firefox 122 we can find various significant new features, as well as support improvements, corrections and more.
On the part of bug fixes, Firefox 122 integrates the solution for 15 vulnerabilities, of which 5 are marked as dangerous and 8 vulnerabilities are caused by memory issues such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.
Main new features of Firefox 122
In this new version of Firefox 122, it stands out that Significant improvements have been made to recommendation display capabilities by entering them in the browser's address bar. Now, some search engines have the ability to display images and text descriptions along with search suggestions. When searching for information related to web development, recommendations include direct links to documentation on MDN providing users with quick access to essential resources.
Another novelty that stands out in Firefox 122 is the process of creating deb packages ready for Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint. These packages are designed to be compatible with the mainstream versions of Firefox available for Debian and Ubuntu, and are offered in ".tar.bz2" format for download. These generated packages include additional optimizations and flags to improve security during the installation. Additionally, a .desktop file has been added to the package to make it easier to create shortcuts on the desktop and in the layout menu. Detailed instructions for installing Firefox from Mozilla's APT repository are available to simplify the deployment process.
In addition, it is highlighted that a new layer of protection against information leakage on previously visited links through pixel color analysis using filters using the currentColor parameter.
Moreover, in Firefox 122 In builds for macOS, support for Passkey technology has been integrated (used only in iCloud Keychain), which allows the user to authenticate without passwords using biometric identifiers such as fingerprints or facial recognition.
In private browsing mode, scripts were given the ability to save data via the cache API to unify behavior in private and regular modes (the existing difference could be used to determine user behavior in private mode).
In the version of Android, new features have been incorporated aimed at improving user privacy and providing greater configuration options, as the introduction of the GPC mechanism (Global Privacy Control), which replaces “DNT” header (Do Not Track). This feature allows websites to be informed that the sale of personal data and its use to track preferences or movements between sites is prohibited.
Additionally, it has been added the Ability to set Firefox as the default PDF viewer on Android devices. This option provides users with greater control over managing PDF documents directly from the browser.
And in order to improve protection against passive user identification, the User-Agent header has been modified. Now, this header is always set to "Android 10", regardless of the actual platform version. This measure contributes to strengthening user privacy by limiting information that could be used to unwantedly identify online users.
In Web Developer Tools, in inspection mode, when editing a selector or properties, pressing Enter confirms your input and sets focus to the corresponding element, instead of moving focus to the next input field (you can use the Tab to move the focus to the next field).
For the part of the improvements for developers:
- It is allowed to use the element inside an element to insert delimiters in lists generated from the element .
- Added ability to use showPicker method with elements to programmatically call the dropdown menu implementation provided by the browser.
- Rules are provided for line breaks when displaying text on web pages to comply with the Unicode standard. Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese now support double-clicking text to highlight entire words.
- The CSS offset-position property is included, which specifies the starting position of the element and is typically used in conjunction with the offset-path property to define the path of animation objects.
- The CSS offset-path property now supports the ray() function, which specifies the line segment that the animated element follows, as well as the base shape and box coordinate values.
- Added support for the rect() and xywh() functions to the CSS clip-path and offset-path properties for creating basic shapes.
- Added support for animating the SVG viewBox attribute using the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) language, designed to animate SVG elements.
Improved page translation quality using the integrated machine translation system. - Issues with translated pages disappearing and interactive widgets not working have been resolved.
- To improve protection against XSS attacks and improve cross-browser portability, SVGUseElement has dropped support for the “data:” URL.
- Enabled handling of the “webautn” completion token. In form autocomplete dialogs, an interface has been implemented to connect using Passkey
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
How to install or update the new version of Firefox on Linux?
Firefox users who have not disabled automatic updates will receive the update automatically. Those who don't want to wait for that to happen can select Menu> Help> About Firefox after the official launch to initiate a manual update of the web browser.
The screen that opens displays the currently installed version of the web browser and runs a check for updates, provided the functionality is enabled.
Another option to update, is yes you are a user of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or some other derivative of Ubuntu, You 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 sudo apt install firefox
You can also choose to install by following the instructions provided by Mozilla.
In the case of Arch Linux users and derivatives, just run in a terminal:
sudo pacman -Syu
Or to install with:
sudo pacman -S firefox
Finally, you can get the browser with the latest installation method that was added "Flatpak". To do this, they must have support for this type of package.
Installation is done by typing:
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
For all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.