Firefox is an open source web browser developed for different platforms, it is coordinated by Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation
The launch of the new version of the popular web browser “firefox 105”, along with which a long-term branch update of version 102.3.0 has also been generated, in addition to which the Firefox 106 branch has been moved to the beta testing stage.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, Firefox 105 fixes 13 vulnerabilities, of which 9 are marked as dangerous (7 are summarized in CVE-2022-40962) and are caused by memory problems such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas. These issues can potentially lead to the execution of malicious code when specially crafted pages are opened.
Main new features of Firefox 105
In this new version presented by Firefox 105 on Linux has reduced the possibility that Firefox is run out of all available memory while running Firefox and has improved performance when running out of free memory.
Another change that I know stands out is thate Support for the User Timing Level 3 specification is provided, which defines a programming interface for developers to measure the performance of their web applications. In the new version, the performance.mark and performance.measure methods have additional arguments to set their own start/end time, duration, and attachments.
In the Android version, the interface has been changed to use the font provided by Android by default, plus the implemented opening tabs provided by Firefox on other devices are also provided.
As for the changes to Windows, it is mentioned that you can now use a swipe gesture with two fingers left or right to browse the browsing history, in addition to which the stability of work in conditions of insufficient memory in the system has been significantly improved.
As for related changes for developers, the following are mentioned:
- The array.includes and array.indexOf methods were optimized using SIMD statements, which allowed double search performance on large lists.
- Added the OffscreenCanvas API, which allows drawing canvas elements to a buffer on a separate thread, independent of the DOM. OffscreenCanvas implements work in the Windows and Web Worker contexts, and also provides font support.
- Added the TextEncoderStream and TextDecoderStream APIs to make it easier to convert streams with binary data to text and vice versa.
- For content processing scripts defined in plugins, the parameter RegisteredContentScript.persistAcrossSessions is implemented, which allows creating persistent (persistent) scripts that save state between sessions.
- Added an option to the print preview dialog to print only the current page.
- Implemented support for partitioned Service Workers on iframes loaded from third party sites (a Service Worker can register on a third party iframe and will be isolated relative to the domain from which this iframe is loaded).
On the part of himto Firefox 106 beta, it stands out that integrated PDF viewer has the ability to draw graphic labels (freehand drawings) and attach text comments enabled by default
Another change that is integrated in this beta, is the Significantly improved WebRTC support (updated libwebrtc library from version 86 to 103), including improved RTP performance and better means of providing screen access in Wayland-based environments.
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