Mozilla Firefox 102 Is Now Available for Download, Adds Geoclue Support on Linux

The Mozilla Firefox 102 open-source, cross-platform, and free web browser is now available for download ahead of its June 28th, 2022, official launch for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.

Mozilla’s monthly Firefox release cycle continues, and Firefox 102 is now here less than a month after Firefox 101 with various enhancements to make your web browsing experience better. For Linux users, it introduces support for Geoclue, a D-Bus service that provides geolocation services when needed by certain websites.

Firefox 102 also improves the Picture-in-Picture feature by adding support for subtitles and captions for the Dailymotion, Disney+ Hotstar, Funimation, HBO Max, SonyLIV, and Tubi video streaming services, and further improves the PDF reading mode when using the High Contrast mode.

Furthermore, Firefox 102 lets you disable the automatic opening of the download panel every time a new download starts, mitigates query parameter tracking when navigating websites in the ETP strict mode, improves security by moving audio decoding into a separate and sandboxed process, and serves as the new Extended Support Release (ESR) as Firefox 91 ESR reaches end of life on September 20th, 2022.

For web developers, this release adds support for filtering style sheets in the Style Editor tab of the Developer Tools, adds support for the wasm-unsafe-eval Content-Security-Policy (CSP) directive, disables the non-standard IDBMutableFile, IDBFileHandle, and IDBFileRequest interfaces, and the IDBDatabase.createMutableFile() method by default, moves the Firefox-only Window.sidebar property behind a preference, and makes the scripting API that’s used for inserting and removing CSS, executing scripts, or managing the registration of content scripts available to Manifest V2 extensions, and adds support for TransformStreams.

Last but not least, Firefox 102 implements a new enterprise policy called StartDownloadsInTempDirectory and a corresponding about:config preference called browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir to force Firefox to initially place downloaded files in a subfolder of the operating system’s temporary folder rather than storing them in the configured download folder.

“Files opened from the “what should Firefox do with this file” dialog, or set to open in helper applications automatically, will stay in this folder. Files saved (not opened as previously mentioned) will still end up in the Firefox download folder,” explains Mozilla.

As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 102 release tomorrow, June 28th, 2022, when it will start rolling out to macOS and Windows systems, but GNU/Linux users can download the binaries for 32-bit or 64-bit GNU/Linux distributions right now from the official download server.

Update 28/06/22: Mozilla officially announced the Firefox 102 release, so I’ve updated the articles with the rest of the new features and improvements implemented.

Last updated 1 year ago