Today January 26 was marked on the calendar for two reasons, or one that also has another meaning. Mozilla just made the release of Firefox 85, the latest stable version of your web browser which is in turn the first for 2021. The other reason why this day was marked on the calendar is because, from today, there is something that can be used much less, and it is practically impossible to do use of it.
Google removed support for Flash Player in Chrome 88, thrown out less than a week ago, and today Firefox 85 will do the same. And no, it's not that Google and Mozilla have turned their backs on it, although perhaps they should have done so long ago; is that Adobe itself decided to abandon it at the end of 2020, so now the browsers are removing all reference to it from the code. Anyone who still wants to use Flash Player for whatever reason, must use other browsers or, if it exists, which I doubt, an extension.
Highlights of Firefox 85
The official news list is short, and is as follows:
- Firefox now protects you from supercookies, a type of tracker that can remain hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you delete cookies. By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to another.
- It's easier than ever to save and access your bookmarks. Firefox now remembers your preferred location for saved bookmarks, displays the bookmarks toolbar by default on new tabs, and gives you easy access to all your bookmarks via a toolbar folder.
- Password manager now allows you to delete all your saved logins with one click, instead of having to delete each login individually.
- Removed Flash Player.
- Various security fixes.
Right now, and although it has been available since yesterday on Mozilla's FTP server, the launch of Firefox 85 is already official. It is now available for all supported systems since project page, but Linux users can only download the binary version from there. In the next few hours they will update the Flathub version and then those of the official repositories of most Linux distributions. So will its Snap package, but since Canonical promised us that everything would be instantaneous and it is not being that way, there is no telling when Firefox 85 will arrive in Snapcraft. In any case, whatever version we use, we should see their new packages soon.