After v102 At the end of June, a little less than 24 hours ago, Mozilla uploaded a new version of its web browser to its servers. Any interested user has since been able to download Firefox 103, but by doing so, what you would be downloading could be a non-final installer, so, although it is not usual, it is worth waiting for the official launch. That moment has already arrived, just when the company updates the page with the news of the new version.
Since yesterday, the notes for this release were empty, as a "placeholder", and said that they were preparing things. That message has already disappeared, and can already be checked all the news that have arrived next to Firefox 103. Although the truth is that there can always be something that they do not mention, a new “flag” in the advanced options or a minor change that does not seem worth mentioning.
What's new in Firefox 103
- Improved responsiveness on macOS during periods of high CPU load by moving to a modern blocking API.
- Required fields are now highlighted on PDF forms.
- Improved performance on monitors with high refresh rate (120Hz+).
- Improved Picture-in-Picture: Subtitle font size can now be changed directly from the PiP window. Additionally, PiP subtitles are now available on Funimation, Dailymotion, Tubi, Hotstar, and SonyLIV.
- Tab toolbar buttons can now be reached with the Tab, Shift+Tab and arrow keys.
- The Windows "Make Text Bigger" accessibility setting now affects all UI and content pages, rather than just system font sizes.
- Firefox will now pin to the Windows taskbar during installation on Windows 10 and 11. This will also allow Firefox to launch faster after installation.
- Non-breaking spaces are now preserved - avoiding automatic line breaks - when copying text from a form control.
- Fixed WebGL performance issues on NVIDIA binary drivers using DMA-Buf on Linux.
- Fixed an issue where Firefox startup could be significantly slowed by local storage processing of web content. This had the biggest impact on users with platter hard drives and significant local storage.
- A configuration option to allow SHA-1 signatures in certificates has been removed: SHA-1 signatures in certificates - long known to be no longer secure enough - are now not supported.
- Our information is now more protected from online tracking thanks to full cookie protection enabled by default. All third party cookies are now isolated in partitioned storage.
- Other corrections, among which there are several introduced by the community.
Firefox 103 has been officially released a few moments ago, and can now be downloaded from the official website of the project. In the next few hours it should appear on Flathub and the snap package should be updated, the latter especially interesting for users of Ubuntu 22.04. The next version will be v104 which is already in the Beta channel.