Firefox 102 Enters Beta Testing with Geoclue Support on Linux, Improved PDF Reading

With the release of Firefox 101, the Mozilla developers are now focusing their efforts on the next release, Firefox 102, which has been promoted to the beta channel earlier this week for public beta testing.

Just like Firefox 101, the upcoming Firefox 102 release doesn’t look to have any major changes. However, for Linux users, it appears to add support for Geoclue, a D-Bus service that provides location information, which Mozilla will use in Firefox 102 to provide geolocation services when needed by certain websites.

Other than that, Firefox 102 looks to improve PDF reading in High Contrast mode, adds support for filtering style sheets in the Style Editor tab of the developer tools, and implements a new enterprise policy called StartDownloadsInTempDirectory and a corresponding about:config preference, namely browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir to force Firefox to initially place downloaded files in a subfolder of the operating system’s temporary folder rather than storing them in the configured download folder.

“Files opened from the “what should Firefox do with this file” dialog, or set to open in helper applications automatically, will stay in this folder. Files saved (not opened as previously mentioned) will still end up in the Firefox download folder,” explains Mozilla.

For web developers, Firefox 102 will disable the non-standard IDBMutableFile, IDBFileHandle, and IDBFileRequest interfaces, as well as the IDBDatabase.createMutableFile() method by default, moves the Firefox-only Window.sidebar property behind a preference, and makes the scripting API used for executing scripts, inserting and removing CSS, and managing the registration of content scripts available to Manifest V2 extensions.

The final release of Firefox 102 is expected on June 28th, 2022. Until then, if you want to take Firefox 102 for a test drive on your personal computer or you just want to help Mozilla iron out any bugs, you can download the latest beta version right now from the official website.

However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not a final product, so don’t use it for any production work!

Last updated 2 years ago