Mozilla has launched today a new version of your web browser. On this occasion, what we can already use is Firefox 109, and among its novelties we have one that did not seem to make much sense, and until the official information has been published we have not been able to know why it has been introduced. We are talking about a new button for extensions which looks a lot like the one used by Chrome, but as our readers reminded us, Firefox already had the overflow menu available. The key to this change has a name: Manifest v3.
Firefox 109 includes Manifest v3 support, although they make it clear that support for version 2 of the "manifest" is still available. The new button is to unify all the extensions under the same menu, and that would explain why they have introduced the change. The rest of the list of news is what you have below.
What's new in Firefox 109
In addition to the new button for extensions, Firefox 109 includes:
- Arbitrary Code Guard exploit protection has been enabled in media player utility processes, improving security for Windows users.
- The native HTML date picker for date and time input can now be used with the keyboard only, improving its accessibility for screen reader users. Users with limited mobility can also use the usual keyboard shortcuts to navigate the calendar grid and month pickers.
- The Spanish Spanish (es-ES) and Spanish Argentinian (es-AR) versions of Firefox now come with a built-in dictionary for the Firefox spell checker.
- As of January 16, Colorways will no longer be in Firefox. Users will still be able to access saved and active Colorways from the Plugins & Themes menu option.
- On macOS, Ctrl or Cmd + trackpad or mouse wheel now scrolls the page instead of zooming. This prevents accidental zooming and matches the behavior of other web browsers on macOS.
- The Recently Closed section of the Firefox view now gives users the ability to manually close/remove url links from the list.
- The empty status messages and widgets that appear in Firefox View for the Tab Collection and Recently Closed sections have been updated to improve the user experience.
- The 'scrollend' event is now activated by default. The event fires when the scroll ends.
- Firefox now permanently partitions Storage into third-party contexts regardless of Storage Access to align with other browsers and provide better web compatibility
Firefox 109 can now be downloaded from the official website of the project. In the next few hours it will appear as an update in most Linux distributions.