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Scheduled for an official release on August 23rd, 2022, the Mozilla Firefox 104 open-source web browser is now available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
Firefox 104 entered public beta testing at the end of July, during which it offered a long-anticipated feature, namely the ability to swipe left and right on web pages using a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture without holding down the Alt key.
Unfortunately, just like Firefox 103, Firefox 104 is missing this long-anticipated feature in the final release, which now appears to have been postponed for the next release, Firefox 105. Of course, you can still navigate back and forward with a touchpad using a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture while holding down the Alt key.
Among other features, Firefox 104 brings support for subtitles on Disney+ in the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) feature, adds support for text writing, drawing and signatures in the built-in PDF viewer, and adds support for the scroll-snap-stop and re-snapping properties to specify the passing of snap points and to keep the last snap position.
With this release, Mozilla decided to adopt a performance feature that was only available for background tabs to the Firefox UI for a performance boost and better battery life. On top of that, Linux users get improved stability and performance when minimizing or restoring windows.
Among some of the bugs fixed in Firefox 104, there’s a fix for preserving the highlight color after typing Enter in the mail composer of Yahoo Mail and Outlook, a fix for the paste unformatted shortcut (Shift+Ctrl+V) to work in plain text contexts like input and text areas, as well as a fix for back navigation on error pages to take you to the previously visited website.
For web developers, Firefox 104 promises support for the Array.prototype.findLast(), Array.prototype.findLastIndex(), TypedArray.prototype.findLast(), and TypedArray.prototype.findLastIndex() methods, which are used to find the value of the last element in an Array or TypedArray that matches a supplied test function and index it.
Devs also get support for the option.focusVisible parameter in HTMLElement.focus() to force a browser to display a visual indication after an element is focused, support for disabling or enabling an SVG style element in the SVGStyleElement.disabled property, as well as support for source to the log.entryAdded event.
As mentioned before, Mozilla will officially announce the Firefox 104 web browser on August 23rd, 2022, along with the Firefox 91.13 and 102.2 ESR releases, when macOS and Windows users will be able to update through OTA (Over-the-Air) updates. However, since this OTA feature is missing for GNU/Linux users, you can download Firefox 104 right now from the official server.
Last updated 2 years ago
