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While you’re probably enjoying your brand-new Firefox 84 web browser, Mozilla is already working on the next version, Firefox 85, which has now hit the public beta channel.
Firefox 84 arrived on Tuesday with the WebRender feature enabled by default for some Linux systems using X11 and the GNOME desktop environment, as well as the ability to allocate shared memory on Linux systems for improved performance and increased compatibility with Docker.
Firefox 84 is also the last version of the popular web browser to support the Adobe Flash Player plugin, which will no longer be supported by Adobe after January 12th, 2021. Therefore, Firefox 85 will be the first release of Mozilla’s web browser to no longer support Adobe Flash Player, which will improve performance and security.
According to Mozilla, there will be no setting in Firefox 85 and future release to re-enable Adobe Flash Player support. Firefox isn’t the only web browser to drop Adobe Flash support, as other web browsers will do the same in their next major releases coming in 2021.
“Even if you install an older version of Firefox, the Flash plugin itself will stop loading Flash content after January 12, 2021,” said Mozilla.
In addition to dropping support for Adobe Flash Player, the upcoming Firefox 85 release will make it easier to remove all your saved logins at once rather than deleting each one individually. This is possible by implementing a new “Remove All Logins” option in the hamburger menu located on the right side of the about:logins page.
Another interesting new feature in Firefox 85 will be a privacy-aware one called ‘Network Partitioning’, which apparently is an anti-tracking feature that other web browsers are already using for some time now. More details on this feature will be provided by Mozilla with the final release in late January.
The final release of Firefox 85 is set for January 26th, 2021, but if you’re an early adopter you can download the beta version right now from the official website. Keep in mind though that this is a pre-release version, so don’t use it for any production work.
Last updated 3 years ago
