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 109, along with which a long-term branch update of version 102.7.0 has been generated.
In addition to innovations and bug fixes, 21 vulnerabilities have been fixed in Firefox 109. 15 vulnerabilities are marked as dangerous, of which 13 vulnerabilities (collected under CVE-2023-23605 and CVE-2023-23606) are caused by memory problems, such as buffer overflows and access to already freed memory areas.
Vulnerability CVE-2023-23597 is due to a logical error in the code to create new child processes and allows you to start a new process in the context of file:// to read the contents of arbitrary files. vulnerability CVE-2023-23598 is caused by a bug handling drag and drop actions in the GTK binding and allows reading the contents of arbitrary files via the DataTransfer.setData call.
Main new features of Firefox 109
In the new version of Firefox 109 by default, it is enabled support for the third version of the Chrome manifest, that defines the features and resources available to extensions written with the WebExtensions API. Support for the second version of the manifest will be maintained for the foreseeable future. Mozilla has moved away from ensuring full manifest support in Firefox and has implemented some features differently. For example, support for the old blocking mode of the webRequest API has not been discontinued and has been replaced by a new declarative content filtering API in Chrome.
Another of the changes that stands out from Firefox 109 is the final decision on granting access is left up to the user, who can selectively decide which plugin to grant access to your data at a particular site. To manage permissions, the “Unified Extensions” button has been added to the interface, with which the user can grant and revoke access to the plugin to any site. The permission control applies only to plugins based on the third version of the manifest; for plugins based on the second version of the manifest, granular access control to sites is not performed.
On GTK systems, the ability to simultaneously move multiple files to the file manager is implemented, plus the Firefox View page has improved appearance of empty sections with recently closed tabs and tabs open on other devices, plus Added buttons to the list of recently closed tabs displayed on the Firefox View page to remove individual links from the list.
It is also noted that the added ability to show entered search query in address bar, instead of displaying the search engine URL (i.e., the keys are displayed in the address bar not only during the input process, but also after accessing the search engine and displaying the search results associated with the keys entered).
On the part of the improvements in the android version, now when watching a video in full screen, the display of the address bar when scrolling is disabled, also added a button to undo the change after removing a pinned site, plus updated the search engine list after change the language and fixed a crash that occurred when placing a large part of the data on the clipboard or address bar.
Another major enhancement for the Android version is improved rendering performance of canvas elements and an issue with video calls that can only use the H.264 codec is resolved.
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