Mozilla Firefox 77 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

Mozilla Firefox 77

Mozilla released today the Firefox 77 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux. This is a monthly update that brings various improvements and security fixes.

Highlights of the Firefox 77 release include improved accessibility by allowing screen reader users to access the applications list in Firefox Options, providing labels for date/time inputs for users of accessibility tools and updated text in the JAWS screen reader for some live regions.

This release also implements support for viewing and managing web certificates via a new about:certificate page, and adds Pocket recommendations on the New Tab page for users located in the United Kingdom (UK).

Among other changes, Firefox 77 removes the browser.urlbar.oneOffSearches preference. Users will now have to uncheck the search engines on the One-Click Search Engines option in the about:preferences#search page if they want to hide the one-off search buttons.

For web developers, Firefox 77 brings support for the String.prototype.replaceAll() JavaScript API , which lets them return a new string with all matches to the provided pattern while preserving the original string, as well as faster loading and stepping through sources in the JavaScript debugger and more reliable source map support.

Several security vulnerabilities were fixed in this release, including a timing attack on DSA signatures discovered in the NSS library, a use-after-free in SharedWorkerService, a JavaScript type confusion with NativeTypes, an URL spoofing issue that occurred when using IP addresses, a memory leak in WebRender when using the border-image CSS directive, and some memory safety bugs.

As usual, you can download the latest Firefox release from the official website, but, as usual, I highly recommend you to upgrade your installations from the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution when the Firefox 77 packages pop up.

The next release, Firefox 78, is expected at the end of the month on June 30th, and it’s available for public beta testing right now.

Update 03/05/20: Mozilla released Firefox 77.0.1 a day after the 77.0 release to disable automatic selection of DNS over HTTPS providers to enable wider deployment in a more controlled way.

Last updated 4 years ago

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