Mozilla Firefox 95 is now available to download.
The latest stable release of this flagship FOSS browser comes with a couple of interesting feature tweaks, improved online security, and lower CPU usage too.
We’ll start with the most obvious change: the picture-in-picture button can be moved to the opposite side of embeds. Oh, I know: groundbreaking, right? 😉 Not exactly; while this isn’t the most consequential change in the history of the browser it is sure to be appreciated by those who make heavy use of this (handy) feature.
Do you use Slack? Firefox 95 bundles a User Agent override the popular confab service. This enables users of this browser to access Slack features like calls and ‘huddles’ otherwise limited to those on other browsers (despite these features working fine in Firefox).
Security issues resulting from third-party libraries will have a much harder time existing in Firefox 95. The latest browser updates introduces RLBox, a technology to “harden Firefox against potential security vulnerabilities“. I can’t say I understand the intricacies of how RLBox works (so I won’t embarrass myself trying to explain. See the Mozilla Hacks blog post for more details.
Some Linux-specific issues addressed in this update include form field popups too small on Wayland; WebGL broken on the Firefox Snap; recognising Sway as a desktop environment; and ensuring drag and drop of tabs and bookmarks works as intended.
Finally, this release ‘avoids posting NSEvent to the event loop every time a non-native event is ran’. This, Mozilla say, helps reduce CPU usage of the WindowServer process (and by extension, improve the battery life on portable devices) on macOS and Windows.
Firefox 95 is free, open source software available to download from the Firefox website. Ubuntu (and related) users receive Firefox updates automatically through typical update mechanisms (meaning: you don’t need to go download anything by hand).