Recently the release of the new version of Firefox 99 was announced along with the "Firefox 91.8.0" long-term branch update. In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 99 fixes 30 vulnerabilities, of which 9 are marked as dangerous. 24 vulnerabilities (21 summarized in CVE-2022-28288 and CVE-2022-28289) are caused by memory issues, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.
The beta version of Firefox 100 introduces the ability to use dictionaries for different languages at the same time when checking the spelling, on Linux and Windows have floating scrollbars enabled by default. Picture-in-Picture mode provides subtitles when watching videos from YouTube, Prime Video, and Netflix. The Web MIDI API is enabled.
Main novelties Firefox 99
This new version of Firefox 99 highlights that added support for native GTK context menus. The feature is enabled via the "widget.gtk.native-context-menus" setting in about:config.
Another novelty is that added floating GTK scrollbars (a full scroll bar appears only when the mouse cursor is hovered, otherwise with any mouse movement a thin indicator line is displayed allowing understanding of the current scroll on the page, but if the cursor is not moves, the indicator disappears after a while). The feature is currently disabled by default, the widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled setting is provided in about:config to enable it.
Moreover, in Firefox 99 reinforced sandbox isolation stands out on Linux: Processes that provide web content processing are prohibited from accessing the X11 server, and also fixed some issues that occurred when using Wayland. In particular, the issue with thread blocking has been fixed, the popup scale has been adjusted, and the context menu has been enabled when checking spelling.
En Android offers the possibility to delete cookies and local data stored selectively only for a specific domain and fixed a crash that occurred after switching to the browser from another app, applying an update, or unlocking the device.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version of Firefox 99:
- Added the navigator.pdfViewerEnabled property, with which a web application can determine if the browser has a built-in ability to display PDF documents.
- Added hotkey 'n' to ReaderMode to enable/disable Narrate mode.
- The built-in PDF viewer provides support for searching with or without diacritics.
- Added support for the RTCPeerConnection.setConfiguration() method, which allows sites to adjust WebRTC settings based on network connection parameters, change the ICE server used for the connection, and the data transfer policies applied.
- Disabled by default is the network information API, through which it was possible to access information about the current connection (for example, type (cellular, bluetooth, ethernet, wifi) and speed).
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 for those who prefer to use Snap packages, they will be able to install the new version by opening a terminal and typing in it
sudo snap install 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.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the Firefox 100 branch has been moved to beta testing and its release is scheduled for May 3.
The main thing is that they fixed the conflict with ffmpeg 5.0, so now you can watch videos without having to have ffmpeg4.4 installed at the same time