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Mozilla pushed today the final release of its Firefox 93 web browser to the main archives for all supported platforms and architectures ahead of the official launch on October 5th, 2021.
Finally, after numerous delays, support for the next-generation AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) image format, which is based on the modern and royalty free AV1 video codec, is now enabled by default. It was supposed to land in Firefox 86 first, but it’s finally here in the Firefox 93 release.
AVIF support in Firefox was in development for more than four years. The new feature landed since Firefox 86, but it wasn’t enabled by default until now due to various bugs and regressions. Firefox 93 is the first release of the popular web browser to enable it by default to help you save even more bandwidth.
“It offers significant bandwidth savings for sites compared to existing image formats. It also supports transparency and other advanced features,” said Mozilla.
Among other changes, the Firefox 93 release introduces an updated Firefox PDF viewer that now supports filling of additional more forms, such as XFA-based forms used by several banks and governments, as well as support for the official Snap package on the AArch64 (ARM64) and ARMhf architectures.
Furthermore, Firefox now protects users against insecure downloads by automatically blocking downloads that rely on insecure connections, download panel has been revamped to follow Firefox’s visual styles, and TLS cipher suites using 3DES have been disabled by default (they can be enabled on systems where deprecated versions of TLS exist).
It also introduces SmartBlock 3.0 to improve web compatibility for privacy protections, introduces a new referrer tracking protection in Private Browsing and Strict Tracking Protection, and improves both the VoiceOver and Orca screen readers to work correctly with Firefox. For more details, check out the release notes.
Without further ado, you can download Firefox 93 right now from Mozilla’s download server here. You’ll find there 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i686) binaries for all supported languages, as well as the source tarball. Mozilla will officially unveil the Firefox 93 release tomorrow, October 5th, 2021.
Last updated 3 years ago
