Mozilla has released a new update to its web browser this afternoon. Behind the v104, today has arrived Firefox 105, a version that will not go down in history because it is one of the ones that includes more and better news, but it is not all the same for all users. This release will be especially good for Linux and Windows installations, as performance has been improved when memory is demanding system resources.
Regarding memory, Mozilla has mentioned two separate points. In one of them he talks about Windows, saying that Firefox 105 handles low memory situations much better. The other point is the one that interests us more, and it says that browser is less likely to run out of memory on Linux and works more efficiently for the rest of the system when memory runs low. A novelty, in fact two, that we will all appreciate.
What's new in Firefox 105
- Added an option to print only the current page from the print preview dialog.
- Support for partitioned service workers in third-party contexts. Service workers can be registered in a third party iframe and it will split under the top level domain.
- Swipe-to-navigate (two fingers on a trackpad swiped left or right to go back or forward through history) is now enabled in Windows. This is something that we had said was coming in the last two versions for Linux, but they have backtracked at the last moment. Twice already.
- Firefox now supports the User Timing L3 specification, which adds additional optional arguments to the performance.mark and performance.measure methods to provide custom start and end times, duration, and attachment details.
- Searching for individual items in large lists is now twice as fast. This performance improvement replaces array.includes and array.indexOf with an optimized SIMD version.
- Stability on Windows has improved significantly as Firefox handles low memory situations much better.
- Touchpad scrolling in macOS has been made more accessible by reducing unintentional diagonal scrolling versus the intended scroll axis.
- Firefox is less likely to run out of memory on Linux and works more efficiently for the rest of the system when memory runs low.
- OffscreenCanvas DOM API support with full context and font support. The OffscreenCanvas API provides a canvas that can be rendered off-screen in both Window and Web Worker contexts.
- Various security fixes, and others contributed by the community.
Firefox 105 available on the Mozilla server since yesterday, September 19, but its launch was made official a few hours ago. You can now download from your official website, and will soon start appearing in the official repositories of most Linux distributions.