The release date of Firefox 96.0 is January 11, 2022. This is the first stable Firefox release in 2022. The new version of Firefox includes some improvements and fixes, including security fixes.

All other Firefox channels are updated at about the same time. Firefox ESR is upgraded to Firefox 91.5 ESR, Firefox Beta and Dev editions to version 97, and Firefox Nightly to version 98.

Check out our preview of the Firefox 95 release here. Mozilla released two small updates for Firefox 95, Firefox 95.0.1, and Firefox 95.0.2, which fixed browser issues.

Summary

• Firefox 96 is a security update.
• Firefox is changing the way cookies from the same domain are handled but use different schemes, for example HTTPS and HTTP. Sites are considered different “under the SameSite cookie directive”.

Firefox 96.0 Download and Update

Firefox 96.0 will be deployed to all systems on January 11, 2022, provided the automatic update feature has not been disabled.

Users can select Firefox menu> Help> About Firefox to view the currently installed version and run a manual check for updates. Updates discovered during verification are downloaded and installed automatically.

Here are the links to the official download repositories.

New features and improvements in Firefox 96.0

Changes to the management of cookies

Firefox 96.0 now applies the Same-Site = lax cookie policy by default. This is one of the three values ​​available for the same site policy and blocks the sending of cookies in third-party contexts. Firefox will automatically use the lax value for sites that do not specify a Same-Site directive.

Mozilla Explain:

Cookies are not sent during normal cross-site sub-requests (for example to upload images or frames to a third-party site), but are sent when a user navigates to the originating site (i.e. say when following a link).

This is the default value of the cookie if SameSite has not been explicitly specified in recent browser versions (see “SameSite: Default to Lax” feature in Browser Compatibility).

Other changes

• The main thread load has been reduced “significantly” according to Mozilla.
• Improvements to noise cancellation and automatic gain control, and “slight improvements to echo cancellation”.

Developer changes

• The hwb () function to be used as a CSS color value has been implemented.
• Firefox now supports the color-scheme property
• The counter-reset property now supports the reversed () function to create reverse CSS counters, intended to number items in descending order.
• navigator.canShare () is now supported on Android
• The Web Locks API is enabled by default.
• Image encoder support has been added for the WebP image format.

Company changes

Mozilla fixes a bug that affected downloading files to mapped network drives. Additionally, Mozilla Firefox now hides the Windows SSO option in preferences if the feature is not supported by the installed version of Windows.

Engineers fixed three policy issues and added two policies that modify the new default cookie policy Same-Site = lax.

• AutoLaunchProtocolsFromOrigins errors were not displayed correctly.
• Search Engines | Add updates search engines when attributes are changed.
• Suggest a URL pattern in search engines | The add did not work correctly.
• New LegacySameSiteCookieBehaviorEnabled policy to set default global handling to legacy behavior.
• New LegacySameSiteCookieBehaviorEnabledForDomainList policy that allows administrators to specify a list of domains for which cookies should be managed using legacy behavior.

Bug fixes

• Click the order links in Gmail to open those links in a new tab.
• Fixes a video issue that saw SSRC removed.
• Fixes a WebRTC downgrade screen sharing resolution.
• Corrects video quality degradation issues on “some sites”.
• Detached video has been disabled on Mac OS in full screen to “avoid certain issues of corruption, change in brightness, missing subtitles and high CPU usage.”

Known issues

None listed.

Security Updates / Patches

Security updates are revealed after the official release of the web browser. You find the information published here after release.

Outlook

Firefox 97, Firefox Beta and Dev 98, Firefox Nightly 99 and Firefox ESR 91.6 will be released on February 8, 2022.

Recently Reviewed Firefox Extensions

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Recent Firefox news and tips

Additional information / sources

Summary

Article name

Mozilla Firefox 96.0 version: here are the new features

The description

The release date of Firefox 96.0 is January 11, 2022. This is the first stable Firefox release in 2022. The new version of Firefox includes some improvements and fixes, including security fixes.

Author

Martin brinkmann

Editor

Ghacks Technology News

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