Firefox 80 comes with improvements for video acceleration, changes in SSL certificates and more

The new version of Firefox 80 is here and unlike other previous versions, this new version presents few changes but it is worth noting that most of them are quite important, one of them is the implementation of support for hardware video acceleration via VA-API for Linux, another is also the acceptance of SSL certificates, since now Firefox will only accept certificates of 398 days, among other things.

Regarding bug fixes and the new features of Firefox 80, are eliminated 13 vulnerabilities, of which 6 are labeled dangerous as these issues could potentially lead to the execution of attacking code when opening specially crafted pages.

In addition, update versions 68.12.0 and 78.2.0 were released. Firefox 68.12 ESR is the latest in its series, and Firefox 68 users will be offered an automatic upgrade to version 78.3 in one month.

Main new features of Firefox 80

In this new version of Firefox 80 a great feature is introduced for Linuxas support for hardware video acceleration via VA-API for systems using the X11 protocol (Previously, such acceleration was only enabled for Wayland.)
The implementation is based on a new DMABUF-based X11 backend, which is prepared by splitting the previously proposed DMABUF backend for Wayland.

Another important change that occurs is on the expiration date that applies to TLS certificates issued as of September 01, 2020, since the lifetime of these certificates will not exceed 398 days And it is worth mentioning that this change is not exclusive to Firefox, since similar restrictions apply in Chrome and Safari. For certificates received before from September 1, trust will remain, but will be limited to 825 days (2,2 years).

For users with migraines and epilepsy, some animation effects have been removed when opening tabs. For example, when loading the content of a tab, an hourglass icon is now displayed instead of a jump point.

A new implementation of the block list has been included for add-ons experiencing security, stability, and performance issues. The new implementation stands out for improving performance and scalability issues by using cascading Bloom filters.

As well provided the ability to set Firefox as the default PDF viewer in the system and several improvements and corrections have been made to the operation of screen readers and compatibility with tools for people with disabilities.

Also in Firefox 80, we can find that added support for RTX and Transport-cc mechanisms to improve the quality of WebRTC calls in poor communication channels and improve the forecast of available bandwidth.

And as for the Related changes for developers:

  • The Animations API includes the KeyframeEffect.composite and KeyframeEffect.iterationComposite composition operations.
  • The Media Session API has added support for defining handlers to change the position in the stream.
  • The KHR_parallel_shader_compile extension is implemented in WebGL, allowing you to run multiple shader build threads at the same time.
  • Window.open () has removed support for the outerHeight and outerWidth parameters.
  • Atomic operations are allowed in WebAssembly, with the exception of shared memory regions.
  • An experimental panel in Tools for Web Developers has been proposed to facilitate the identification of incompatibilities between browsers.
  • In the network activity monitoring interface, visual tags have been added to highlight slow requests, whose execution time exceeds 500 ms.
  • The commands »: block» and »: unblock» are implemented in the web console to block and unblock network requests.
  • When the JavaScript debugger pauses on an exception, the code bar now displays a tooltip with a stack trace.

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

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
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/80.0/snap/firefox-80.0.snap

And to install the package we just type:

sudo snap install firefox-80.0.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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  1.   Juan Carlos said

    Very interesting this new version. However, I am currently using Vivaldi on Debian 10 Plasma, and the truth has surprised me quite a bit. Brave is also another best browser. Firefox has very good competition.

  2.   Tamajón said

    Hardware video acceleration is a problem in linux browsers, I tried this version 80 in Manjaro and the use of cpu when playing from youtube does not change, I do not get a human way to activate this feature neither in firefox nor in chromium nor in any browser (I have not tried Gnome Web), a shame because it is the only thing that separates me and other users from using linux ...