Firefox 78, a version with many improvements and with support for WebRender, uninstaller and more

In the past week the Mozilla guys released the release of Firefox 78, which is a version that brings many new features, bug fixes, changes, business enhancements, and security fixes. After this launch a few hours later a corrective version was released which only solved a problem with the search bar where the problem could cause the installed search engines not to appear visible.

But focusing on the most notable changes from this current branch, we can find for example the addition of WebRender improvements for Windows 10 users, error pages for all sites that do not support TLS 1.2 and a new update option in the Firefox uninstaller.

Firefox 78 is also the last major release to support macOS versions 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11, with support for these versions to be provided only through Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 78.x for next year.

Main new features of Firefox 78

In this new version, lWindows users find the implementation GPU-based 2D rendering engine WebRender with support for the Intel graphics processor.

While generally in Firefox 78 we can find an option for update your installation in the Firefox uninstaller. This will allow users to first have the option to update their Firefox installation when starting the Firefox uninstall wizard.

This them will solve most of the problems that cause an uninstall without removing and reinstalling the web browser, making it easier to troubleshoot by clicking the "Update" button instead of "Uninstall."

Additionally, with this release, the screen saver will no longer interrupt WebRTC calls in Firefox, thus improving conference and video calls in Firefox.

Firefox 78 is also our Extended Support version (ESR), where changes made in the previous 10 versions will now be rolled out to our ESR users.

Another important change is that all DHE-based TLS ciphers have been disabled by default. To mitigate web compatibility issues related to disabling DHE-based TLS cipher suites, Firefox 78 enables two other AES-GCM SHA2-based cipher suites.

Of the other changes that stand out:

  • Be able to check if any of your saved passwords may have been exposed in a data breach
  • Correction of errors in the quality composition of the search results and improved the texts of the search results based on the recommendations of our partners.
  • The minimum system requirements for Linux have been updated. Firefox now requires GNU libc 2.17, libstdc ++ 4.8.1, and GTK + 3.14 or newer versions.
  • The context menu (accessible by right-clicking on a tab) allows you to cancel multiple tab closures with a single click and places the Close tabs on the right and Close the other tabs in a submenu.
  • Enable support for stored client certificates on macOS and Windows by setting the experimental preference security.osclientcerts.autoload to true.
  • The new policies allow you to configure application administrators, disable picture in picture, and request a master password, which will be renamed to "master password" in future releases.

How to install or update the new version of Firefox 78 on Linux?

For those who are interested in being able to install this new version or update to it, they should follow the instructions that we share below.

If 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

Done this now they just have to install with:

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 for those who prefer to use Snap packages, They will be able to install the new version as soon as it is released in the Snap repositories.

But they can get the package directly from Mozilla's FTP. With the help of a terminal by typing the following command:

wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/78.0/snap/firefox-78.0.snap

And to install the package we just type:

sudo snap install firefox-78.0.snap

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.


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