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The Mozilla Firefox 87 web browser is now available to download for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Firefox 87 is apparently a small release that only improves the “Highlight All” functionality on Find in Page to display marks that correspond to the position of the matches found next to the scrollbar, greatly simplifies the Web Developer and Help menu by removing some redundant items.
Improvements were also bought to Private Browsing and Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection with SmartBlock for a more reliable browsing experience, and the new default HTTP Referrer policy has been updated to prevent websites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data.
Firefox 87 also adds the Silesian (szl) locale, removes some redundant items from the Library button, which Mozilla considered that they weren’t used so often by users or that can be accessed from other parts of the web browser, and fixes various accessibility and security issues.
In other news, Firefox 87 disables the Backspace key from working as a “Back” button on macOS and Windows systems in order to prevent user data loss when filling forms. This functionality was already disabled on Linux systems, and Mozilla recommends using the Alt+Left arrow keyboard shortcut instead.
This release was also supposed to enable AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) by default, which, for some reason, it didn’t happen. Hopefully, the next Firefox release will finally enable AVIF support by default on Linux. Of course, you can always enable it manually by setting the image.avif.enabled option in about:config to true.
Mozilla will officially announce the Firefox 87 web browser tomorrow, March 23rd, 2021, for all supported platforms, but if you want to download the binaries for 32-bit or 64-bit systems, as a Snap for Linux systems supporting Ubuntu’s Snap packages, or as a source tarball, you can do it right now from Mozilla’s FTP servers.
Last updated 3 years ago
