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Firefox 108, the next major release of Mozilla’s open-source, free, and cross-platform web browser used by millions of users worldwide, is now available for download ahead of its official launch on December 13th, 2022.
Firefox 108 entered public beta testing on November 15th, when Mozilla promoted the Firefox 107 release to the stable channel. During the beta testing phase, it received a total of nine beta versions, similar to all the previous releases since Firefox hit the 100 version number.
Firefox 108 isn’t a big update, but it does bring a few interesting enhancements, starting with support for the WebMIDI API, which makes it easier for musicians to interact with MIDI musical instruments using the Web.
WebMIDI is an API designed to provide MIDI support in web browsers. The WebMIDI API support comes along with a new experimental mechanism for controlling access to dangerous capabilities.
Also new in Firefox 108 is support for importing maps that allow web pages to control the behavior of JavaScript imports by default, support for proper color correction of images tagged with ICCv4 profiles, and a new keyboard shortcut (Shift+Esc) for opening Firefox’s Process Manager feature so you can more quickly identify resource-hungry processes.
On top of that, this new Firefox release improves the handling of non-ASCII characters when saving and printing PDF forms and improves the default state of the “Only show on New Tab” option in the bookmarks toolbar to also work correctly for blank new tabs. Users will still be able to change the behavior of the bookmark toolbar using the toolbar context menu.
Moreover, Firefox 108 improves the frame scheduling when under load. According to Mozilla, this change alone considerably improves Firefox’s MotionMark scores. A total of eight security issues were also fixed in this release, one of them only affecting Linux users. More details on these security fixes are available here.
For web developers, Firefox 108 promises support for the height and width attributes in the <source> element when it’s used as a child of a <picture> element, enablement of trigonometric functions by default to allow the use of sin(), cos(), tan(), asin(), acos(), atan(), and atan2() functions within the calc() CSS function, as well as support for the style-src-elem, style-src-attr, script-src-elem and script-src-attr Content-Security-Policy HTTP header directives.
Add-on developers should also know that starting with this version Firefox now issues a warning when an extension is installed and its version number does not follow the recommended format. For Windows users, this release enables efficiency mode on Windows 11 systems for processes used for background tabs to limit resource use.
As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 108 release on December 13th, 2022, when it will be available as an OTA (Over-the-Air) update on supported platforms, but you can download it right now from the official website. Meanwhile, check out the release notes for more details.
Mozilla Firefox 102.6.0 ESR was also released for ESR (Extended Support Release) users.
Update 13/12/22: Mozilla officially announced the Firefox 108 release so I’ve updated the article with details about the rest of the new features and security fixes, as well as a link to the official download page and the release notes.
Last updated 1 year ago
