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The Mozilla Firefox 122 web browser is now available for download ahead of its official release on January 23rd, 2024, so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.
For Linux users, Firefox 122 looks like will finally ship with a DEB package for Debian-based distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc., that don’t want to use Firefox in a containerized bundle like Snap or Flatpak.
For example, Linux Mint devs didn’t want to ship Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap so they had to create their own DEB package. With the official Firefox DEB package created by Mozilla, they won’t have to maintain yet another app.
According to Mozilla, the Firefox DEB package promises better performance due to Mozilla’s advanced compiler-based optimizations, hardened binaries with all security flags enabled during compilation, access to the latest updates as fast as possible, and continuous browsing as you don’t have to restart Firefox after upgrading the package.
Firefox 122 also improves the quality of the translations created by the new built-in translation feature introduced in Firefox 118. With this release, Firefox should offer more stable translations that no longer break interactive widgets on some websites and reduce the risk of content disappearing when translated.
This release also improves the web browser compatibility for line breaking by matching the line-breaking rules to the Unicode Standard and adds proper support for language-aware word selection when double-clicking on text for Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Thai users.
Among other changes, Firefox 122 will enable scripts to store the cacheAPI data in Private Browsing mode, taint filters that use currentColor as an input to further protect user privacy, and display images and descriptions for search suggestions when provided by the search engine.
Starting with this release, Firefox no longer offers the “Snippets” option in Settings > Home, a feature that provided users with tips and news from Mozilla and Firefox. In addition, the “Search Bar” settings in Settings > Search, which let you choose between using the address bar for search and navigation or add the search bar in the toolbar, is also gone in Firefox 122.
For Android users, Firefox 122 brings the ability to report the OS version as “Android 10” in Firefox Android’s User-Agent string to reduce user fingerprinting information and improve compatibility with some websites.
In addition, Firefox for Android users will be able to set the web browser as the default PDF reader and enable the Global Privacy Control feature that informs websites not to sell or share their browsing data. This can be enabled from Settings > Enhanced Tracking Protection > Tell websites not to share & sell data.
For web developers, Firefox 122 adds support for animating the SVG viewBox attribute using SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), support for the LargestContentfulPaint API, support for the showPicker method on <select> elements, as well as support for ray() on the offset-path CSS property.
In addition, Firefox 122 adds support for basic-shape and coord-box for the offset-path CSS property, support for rect() and xywh() basic shapes on the clip-path and offset-path CSS properties, support for the Screen Wake Lock API, support for <hr>-in-<select>, and the ability to recognize the “webauthn” autocomplete token.
Last but not least, this release changes the fallback URL parser for unknown schemes to DefaultURI in an attempt to improve specification adherence and web compatibility, as well as to enable the ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer proposal methods, which enable ownership transferring of ArrayBuffer data.
Also, Firefox 122 enables Uneven Level Protection Forward Error Correction (ULPFEC) by default for WebRTC services to improve video quality for users with weak Internet connections. Of course, various security issues and bugs were addressed as well in this release.
As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially announce the Firefox 122 release tomorrow, January 23rd, 2024. Until then, you can download the official binary or DEB packages from Mozilla’s download server.
Last updated 3 months ago
