The Mozilla Firefox 122 web browser is now available for download ahead of its official release on January 23rd, 2024, so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.
For Linux users, Firefox 122 appears to be set to finally ship with a DEB package for Debian-based distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc., that prefer not to use Firefox in a containerized bundle like Snap or Flatpak.
For instance, the developers of Linux Mint did not want to include Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap so they created their own DEB package. With the official Firefox DEB package created by Mozilla, they will not need to maintain another app.
As per Mozilla, the Firefox DEB package should offer improved performance due to Mozilla’s advanced compiler-based optimizations, hardened binaries with all security flags enabled during compilation, rapid access to the latest updates, and continuous browsing as you won’t have to restart Firefox after upgrading the package.
Firefox 122 also improves the quality of the translations created by the new built-in translation feature introduced in Firefox 118. With this release, Firefox should offer more stable translations that no longer break interactive widgets on some websites and reduce the risk of content disappearing when translated.
This release also improves the web browser compatibility for line breaking by matching the line-breaking rules to the Unicode Standard and adds proper support for language-aware word selection when double-clicking on text for Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Thai users.
Among other changes, Firefox 122 will enable scripts to store the cacheAPI data in Private Browsing mode, taint filters that use currentColor as an input to further protect user privacy, and display images and descriptions for search suggestions when provided by the search engine.
Starting with this release, Firefox no longer offers the “Snippets” option in Settings > Home, a feature that provided users with tips and news from Mozilla and Firefox. In addition, the “Search Bar” settings in Settings > Search, which let you choose between using the address bar for search and navigation or add the search bar in the toolbar, is also gone in Firefox 122.
For Android users, Firefox 122 brings the ability to report the OS version as “Android 10” in Firefox Android’s User-Agent string to reduce user fingerprinting information and improve compatibility with some websites.
Moreover, Android Firefox users have the choice to designate the web browser as their default PDF viewer and activate the Global Privacy Control characteristic that notifies websites not to sell or distribute their browsing data. This can be activated from Settings > Enhanced Tracking Protection > Tell websites not to share & sell data.
Developers of the web, Firefox 122 integrates support for the animation of the SVG viewBox attribute utilizing SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), support for the LargestContentfulPaint API, support for the showPicker method on <select> elements, as well as the backing for ray() on offset-path CSS property.
Furthermore, Firefox 122 also introduces support for basic-shape and coord-box for offset-path CSS property, support for rect() and xywh() basic shapes on clip-path and offset-path CSS properties, it also backs the Screen Wake Lock API, support for <hr>-in-<select>, and the ability to identify the “webauthn” autocomplete token.
Last but not least, this release changes the fallback URL parser for unknown schemes to DefaultURI in an attempt to improve specification adherence and web compatibility, as well as to enable the ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer proposal methods, which enable ownership transferring of ArrayBuffer data.
Also, Firefox 122 enables Uneven Level Protection Forward Error Correction (ULPFEC) by default for WebRTC services to improve video quality for users with weak Internet connections. Of course, various security issues and bugs were addressed as well in this release.
As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 122 release tomorrow, January 23rd, 2024. Until then, you can download the official binary or DEB packages from Mozilla’s download server.
Last updated 8 hours ago
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