by 
With the Firefox 91 release out the door, Mozilla promoted today the next major release, Firefox 92, to the beta channel for public testing, giving us an early look at the new features.
Guess what? AVIF support is enabled by default (yes, again, for the fourth time) and looks to be the biggest feature of Firefox 92, which is expected to see the light of day next month on September 7th.
Mozilla kept delaying AVIF support by default because they wanted to implement more features like transparency and other advanced features, and it looks like Firefox 92 beta comes with support for the new AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) image format, which is based on the modern and royalty free AV1 video codec to provide users with significant bandwidth savings.
Looking in about:config at the image.avif.enabled option, we can see that it’s set to true, but, as I said before, if it doesn’t make it into the final release, you can always enable it by setting the image.avif.enabled option in about:config from false to true. Remember, AVIF support is there, it’s just not enabled by default, so fingers crossed for it to land in the final release.
Apart from the AVIF support by default, Firefox 92 promises an improved Firefox PDF viewer with support for filling more forms, such as XFA-based forms used by various governments and banks, improved bookmark toolbar menus that follow Firefox’s visual styles, and redesigned certificate error pages for a better user experience.
If you want to take Firefox 92 for a test drive, you can download the beta release right now from here. Please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that should not be use for any production work. Also, note the fact that the changes presented above may not make it into the final release on September 7th, 2021.
Last updated 3 years ago
