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With the release of Firefox 112 hitting the stable channel today, Mozilla promoted today the next major release, Firefox 113, to the beta channel for public testing.
Firefox 113 looks like an interesting release that will bring support for animated AV1 images (AVIS), a more secure password generator that now includes special characters too, and an enhanced Picture-in-Picture feature that lets you rewind, check the video duration, and more easily enable the full-screen mode.
The upcoming Firefox release also appears to introduce a feature that was initially planned for Firefox 112, namely the ability for Linux and macOS users to use FIDO2 / WebAuthn authenticators over USB with support for fully passwordless logins.
Another interesting change that it’s not yet mentioned in the release notes is the fact that Mozilla now offers an official DEB binary package for Debian and Ubuntu systems. This should make it a lot easier for these users to update their Firefox installations to the latest version on the day of the release.
However, please note the DEB package depends on the libgdk-pixbuf-xlib-2.0-0 and libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 packages to be installed on your Debian/Ubuntu system. You can download the official Debian package from Mozilla here for 64-bit systems and from here for 32-bit systems.
On top of that, the bookmarks importing feature has been updated to also import the favicons for those bookmarks by default to make them easier to identify when importing browsing data from Chrome-based browsers.
Firefox 113 also promises some goodies for Android users, such as support for hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding by default on supported hardware or via software decoding and the ability to print from websites that use window.print().
Web developers will be happy to learn that Firefox 113 promises support for the scripting CSS media query, support for several new WebRTC features for improved interoperability, support for the forced-color-adjust property, support for color functions from the color (level 4) specification, as well as the ability for module scripts to import other ES module scripts on worklets.
Mozilla plans to release the Firefox 113 web browser for all supported platforms on May 9th, 2023. Until then, if you want to take the new features and improvements mentioned above for a test drive, you can download the latest beta release from the official website.
However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use it for any production work!
Update 25/04/2023: Mozilla stopped generating the Debian (DEB) package for Firefox 113 starting with the third beta release. The beta release notes still don’t mention anything about a Debian package, so it remains to be seen if Firefox 113 will have a dedicated Debian package or not.
Last updated 12 months ago
