Firefox is a popular web browser
A few days ago Mozilla announced the release of the corrective version of Firefox 109.0.1 which fixes several issues, one of which is reverting font smoothing changes on the Windows platform that caused poor rendering on some systems.
Another change made in this corrective version is that fixed stutter when loading pages that contain a large number of emoji characters.
Also fixed issue where authentication prompt was not displayed on some corporate systems, as well as fixed an issue with incorrectly sized event handler switches in the inspect interface for web developers.
If you are interested in being able to learn more about this corrective version, you can check the details at the following link.
In addition to the release of the corrective version, it is also worth mentioning the recent report on the use of hardware acceleration in Firefox in the Fedora 37 environment in a system with an NVIDIA video card. The report was prepared by Martin Stransky, maintainer of Firefox packages on Fedora and RHEL, porting Firefox to Wayland.
Some time ago my employer (Red Hat) lent me NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and I finally managed to install it on a workstation instead of my own AMD RX 6600 XT…
Firefox can decode video directly on NVIDIA hardware. The driver translates the VA-API calls from Firefox to the VPDAU used by NVIDIA. I think you also need decently new NVIDIA drivers that support DMABuf (used to transfer decoded images between Firefox processes and render them as GL textures).
It is observed that Firefox was able to successfully enable hardware graphics acceleration in X11 and Wayland environments using NVIDIA's proprietary driver from the RPM Fusion repository by translating VA-API (Video Acceleration API, supported by Firefox) calls to VDPAU (Video Decoding and Presentation API) API for Unix, provided by NVIDIA). The translation was done using the nvidia-vaapi-driver package, which is also found in the RPM Fusion repository.
To work, it is mentioned that VA-API support must be explicitly enabled via the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled parameter in about:config and set the environment variables "NVD_BACKEND=direct" and "MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1" before launching the browser to disable rendering process isolation, in which up to Unresolved issues with accessing the VA-API from the sandbox have now been noted.
It is worth mentioning that it is observed that the hardware acceleration performance with this use of NVIDIA is not inferior to the configurations with AMD and Intel GPUs.
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
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.