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Mozilla’s Firefox 84 web browser is now available for download and you can be the first to be install and use it on your GNU/Linux distribution.
Firefox 84 had a small release cycle with only eight beta versions and comes a month after Firefox 83, which added a HTTPS-Only mode to make your web browsing more secure.
“We’ll ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time, ever!” – Mozilla
The biggest change in Firefox 84 for Linux users appears to be the enablement of WebRender by default on Linux/GNOME/X11. Yes, you’re reading that right, Mozilla said that the WebRender feature will be enabled on GNU/Linux systems using the GNOME desktop environment and running on top of X.Org Server (X11), not Wayland.
WebRender is known to boost your web browsing experience while also making Firefox more faster and smoother, so that’s awesome news for Linux users.
Firefox 84 is also the final release to support Adobe’s controversial Flash Player plugin. That’s because Flash Player will reach end of life in just two weeks from the moment of writing this article, at the end of 2020. From Firefox 85 onwards, Mozilla won’t include the Adobe Flash Player in its popular web browser.
Among other noteworthy changes, Firefox 84 adds support for loading all of Mozilla’s trusted intermediate certificate authorities on new profiles in a single day, from Remote Settings, thus avoiding any security errors on misconfigured websites.
More of Firefox 84’a new features and improvements will be unveiled tomorrow, December 15th, when Mozilla will officially launch the new version of its web browser. Until then, you can download the binaries right now for 64-bit or 32-bit systems from Mozilla’s FTP servers here.
Update: Firefox 84 was officially launched by Mozilla on December 15th, revealing that the web browser comes with the ability to allocate shared memory on Linux systems for improved performance and increased compatibility with Docker.
For web developers, this release updates the Network panel to handle unexpected crashes and make it easier for users to report bugs, as well as the Accessibility Panel, which now includes an option for displaying elements in their tabbing order to help devs see what elements are focusable when tabbing and in what sequence.
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