Mozilla Firefox 90 Is Now Available for Download, Removes Built-In FTP Support

Mozilla Firefox 90

Mozilla published today the final bits of their upcoming Firefox 90 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The biggest change in the Mozilla Firefox 90 release is the deprecation of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) support. Firefox follows on the footsteps of Google Chrome/Chromium, and other web browsers, to no longer allow access to ftp:// links.

Mozilla started deprecating FTP support since Firefox 88, but users where able to re-enable the feature by setting the network.ftp.enabled option from false to true in about:config. But starting with the Firefox 90 release, all FTP code is now gone forever and can’t be re-enabled, which means that you’ll have to use a special app to access your FTP sites.

However, Mozilla said in a blog post that the FTP protocol is now included in the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions, which means that Firefox add-ons will be able to prompt users to launch a FTP application to handle certain links.

Security-wise, Firefox 90 introduces support for Fetch Metadata Request Headers, a security feature that lets web apps protect themselves and you against various cross-origin threats, such as cross-site request forgery (CSRF), cross-site leaks (XS-Leaks), or speculative cross-site execution side channel (Spectre) attacks.

“The fundamental security problem underlying cross-site attacks is that the web in its open nature does not allow web application servers to easily distinguish between requests originating from its own application or originating from a malicious (cross-site) application,” explains Mozilla.

Among other changes, Firefox 90 lets you manage exceptions to the HTTPS-Only mode in about:preferences#privacy, updates the Print to PDF feature to produce working hyperlinks, improves the performance of software WebRender and moves most users without hardware-accelerated WebRender to software WebRender.

Furthermore, the “Open Image in New Tab” context menu item has been updated to open images and media in a background tab by default. For web developers, this release of Mozilla Firefox adds support for Private Fields in DevTools and ships an updated Network panel that now displays a preview of HTTP requests for fonts in the Response tab.

Mozilla plans to officially unveil the Firefox 90 browser tomorrow, July 13th, but you can download it right now from the official server. Linux users who don’t want to use this binary version, will have to wait a little longer for the new release to make its way into the stable channels of their GNU/Linux distribution before updating.

Last updated 3 years ago

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