There are media that have been announcing the launch of Firefox 101 for more than 24 hours now. But no, Mozilla usually releases new versions of its web browser on Tuesdays, the day of the week we are today. In addition, they also usually have an hour to deliver these updates to us, and in Spain it is from 14:15 p.m. to XNUMX:XNUMX p.m. Anything other than that is unusual, or because they are talking about when they have uploaded the software to their server, not about an official release.
Now we can talk about the launch is official, not only because it can be downloaded from their website, but also because it has been more than three hours since they have updated the news page with all the changes included in Firefox 101. Among them we can read a lot of text, but in reality there are no big news to take into account. Do not forget that this is the first update after the 100th version of the browser zorro panda, and that's when they put more meat on the grill. Still, there are changes, and you have them in the following list.
What's new in Firefox 101
- Reading is now easier with the “prefer contrast” media query, which allows sites to detect if the user has requested that web content be presented with higher (or lower) contrast.
- We can choose. All unconfigured MIME types can now be assigned a custom action on download completion.
- Firefox now allows users to use as many microphones as they want, at the same time, during video conferences. The most interesting advantage is that you can easily change the microphone at any time (if the conference service provider allows this flexibility).
- Checker Dashboard:
- When adding/removing a class name to/from an existing HTML element (using the .cls button in the rules view), an autocomplete dropdown automatically offers all existing class names on the page. In Firefox 101, the class name selected in the autocomplete dropdown list is auto-applied immediately when the user changes the autocomplete list selection (using the up/down arrow keys). This is especially useful for quickly trying out various styles.
- New option that can be used to disable drag-to-refresh features in the ruler view (the values of some CSS properties, eg sizes, can be changed by dragging the mouse horizontally).
- Screenshot showing the checkbox for the “drag to refresh” option in the Inspector Panel
- WebDriver BiDi: This protocol is enabled in the release channel to support external tools like Selenium, which plan to start using WebDriver BiDi for Firefox. The goal of WebDriver-BiDi is to provide a cross-browser protocol for browser automation that meets the requirements of modern web application testing tools. This allows both the client and the server to send and receive requests and responses.
- The new Firefox has added support for large, small, dynamic, and logical view units (*vi and *vb). This gives users the flexibility to choose whether page elements have the “smallest” viewport size (dynamic toolbar visible), the “largest” viewport size (dynamic toolbar hidden ), or the size of the "dynamic" viewport (based on the current state of the dynamic toolbar).
- Firefox 101 has added support for enumeration (reducing errors caused by transposition or misspelling of numbers) and selecting multiple audio input devices (giving you the ability to record or process multiple separate audio sources together, synchronously, at a time) via navigator.mediaDevices.enumerateDevices().
- Bug fixes, including some patches by the community.
As we have explained, Firefox 101 available since yesterday on the Mozilla server, but the official launch occurred this afternoon. Linux users can download a binary version, the snap package, the flatpak or official repositories, although the latter option may take longer to arrive.