The new version of the popular web browser "Firefox 73" has already been released, jAlong with the mobile version of Firefox 68.5 for AndroidIn addition, an update has been generated for the long-support version “68.5.0”.
In this new edition of the browser, various changes are highlighted of which come a handful of new features and improvements to existing ones, such is the case of the inclution NextDNS service support for DNS over HTTPS mode (DoH), with this, now I can choose between NextDNS or CloudFlare.
Other changes that stand out in Firefox 73 is the implementation of the first phase of the interruption of the installed plugins for the alternative solution.
The change only applies to the installation of plugins in shared directories processed by all instances of Firefox on the system (no user connection). A similar method is generally used to pre-install plug-ins in distributions, for unsolicited substitution with third-party applications, to integrate malicious plug-ins, or to distribute plug-ins separately with their installer.
In Firefox 73, these add-ons will continue to work, but will be transferred from the shared directory to individual user profiles, that is, it will be converted to the format used during installation via the add-on manager.
In addition, It is also highlighted that the ability to establish a global scale level was implemented applied to all pages and not linked to individual sites. The general scale can be changed in the settings in the "Language and appearance" section.
Moreover, on systems with NVIDIA drivers patented newer than 432 and screen resolutions lower than 1920 × 1200, the composition system WebRender is enabled.
Previously, WebRender was only included for the NVIDIA GPU with the Nouveau driveras well as for AMD and Intel GPUs. The WebRender composition system is written in Rust and takes the rendering operations of the page content aside from the GPU.
Of the other changes that are highlighted in the announcement:
- Added support for SVG letter spacing properties and word spacing property.
- Improved sound quality by increasing or decreasing the playback speed;
- Improved automatic detection of old text encodings on pages that do not explicitly indicate encoding information.
- Reduced the load when collecting statistics for the network activity dashboard.
- The JavaScript debugger and the web console have sped up the loading of large scripts with reference to their original sources (mapped at source).
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How to install or update the new version of Firefox 73 on Linux?
It is important to mention that most Linux distributions have the Firefox package in their repositories, so the availability of this new version may take a few days.
However, it is possible to obtain this new version in a faster way. Such is the case for Ubuntu, Linux Mint or some other Ubuntu derivative users, They 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/73.0/snap/firefox-73.0.snap
And to install the package we just type:
sudo snap install firefox-73.0.snap
For all other Linux distributions can download the binary packages from the following link.