Firefox 96 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

Firefox 96

Mozilla’s upcoming Firefox 96 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available to download for all supported platforms ahead of the official release tomorrow, January 11th, 2022.

Firefox 96 is here as the first release of the open-source web browser in 2022, bringing a handful of modest performance and security improvements to make your web browsing experience more stable, reliable, and secure.

For example, the new Firefox release significantly reduces the main thread load, significantly improves noise-suppression and auto-gain-control, and slightly improves echo-cancellation to provide users with a better overall experience.

Security-wise, Firefox 96 enforces the Cookie Policy: Same-Site=lax option by default to protect users against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

For Linux users, Firefox 96 changes the keyboard shortcut for the “Select All” function from Alt+A to Ctrl+A. In previous releases, both keyboard shortcuts were available when selecting all the text from a web page, but that’s no longer the case because Mozilla wants to avoid access keys conflicts and also solve Web Compat issues.

“If you want to keep using Emacs like key bindings, e.g., you configured your GTK settings to use Ctrl+A as a shortcut key for moving caret to beginning of a line, you need to change ui.key.textcontrol.prefer_native_key_bindings_over_builtin_shortcut_key_definitions and ui.key.use_select_all_in_single_line_editor from about:config. These prefs are currently disabled by default but would be enabled by default in a future release,” says Mozilla.

Among other changes, Firefox 96 fixes an issue where video intermittently drops SSRC, fixes an issue where WebRTC downgrades the screen sharing resolution, fixes video quality degradation in certain websites, and adds the ability to choose to print only the odd/even pages.

If you’re using Firefox via the binaries provided by Mozilla, you can download Firefox 96 right now from the main FTP server. If not, you should wait for the new Firefox release to land in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, which should happen by the end of this week.

Last updated 2 years ago

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