Firefox is an open source web browser developed for different platforms, it is coordinated by Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation.
The release of the new version of Firefox 112, version along with which a long-term branch update of version 102.10.0 has also been generated.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, 46 vulnerabilities have been fixed in Firefox 112. 34 vulnerabilities are marked as dangerous, of which 26 vulnerabilities (collected under CVE-2023-29550 and CVE-2023-29551) are caused by memory issues, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas .
Main new features of Firefox 112
In this new version that comes from Firefox 112, “Reveal password” has been added to the context menu which is displayed when you right-click the password input field to display the password in plain text instead of asterisks.
For users of Ubuntu, the ability to import bookmarks and browser data from Chromium is provided installed as a snap package (only works so far if Firefox is not installed from a snap package).
Another change that stands out is that it added support for DNS-over-Oblivious-HTTP, which preserves user privacy when querying for a DNS resolution. To hide the user's IP address from the DNS server, an intermediate proxy is used, which redirects client requests to the DNS server and translates the responses through itself. This option can be enabled from network.trr.use_ohttp, network.trr.ohttp.relay_uri and network.trr.ohttp.config_uri in about:config.
In addition to that, in the dropdown menu with a list of tabs (called via the "V" button on the right side of the tab panel), now it is possible to close a tab clicking the list item with the middle mouse button.
The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-T which is used to restore a now closed tab can also be used to restore a previous session if there are no more closed tabs of the same session to reopen.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added an item (key symbol) to the panel content configurator to quickly open the password manager.
- Optimized the movement of elements to a tab bar that contains a large number of tabs.
- For strict users of the Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) mechanism, the list of cross-site navigation tracking parameters known to be stripped from the URL (such as utm_source) has been expanded.
- Added information about the ability to enable the WebGPU API on the support page.
- On Windows systems with Intel GPUs, when software video decoding is used, downscaling operations are improved and the load on the GPU is reduced.
- By default, the U2F JavaScript API is disabled, which is designed to orchestrate two-factor authentication operation on various web services.
- The Clear button has been added to the interface for selecting dates in web form fields, allowing you to quickly clear the contents of fields with date types and local datetime.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it of this new version of the browser, you can check the details In the following link.
How to install or update the new version of Firefox in Ubuntu and derivatives?
As always, for those who already use firefox, they can simply access the menu to update to the latest version, that is, Firefox users who have not disabled automatic updates will receive the update automatically.
While for those who do not want to wait for that to happen they 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 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
The last 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