Firefox 81 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

Firefox 81

Mozilla’s Firefox 81 web browser is now up for grabs as the Open Source company pushed the final bits and published the new release on its FTP servers.

Firefox 81 continues the monthly release cycle and brings a bunch of new features and improvements to make your web browsing experience better, faster, more stable, more secure, and ultimately more enjoyable.

The biggest new feature in Firefox 81 appears to be new media controls that allow users to control audio and video playback through the hardware media keys on a keyboard, the media keys on a headset, or a virtual media control interface.

On Linux, this release enables the VA-API/FFmpeg hardware acceleration for video playback by default on systems using the traditional X11/X.Org Server display server. This feature was introduced in Firefox 80, but it was disabled by default so the user had to enabled it in about:config.

Also on Linux, there’s a new hidden setting that lets users override the preference to restore windows on particular worspaces. To enable it, you’ll have to type about:config in the address bar to access the advanced settings, then add and set the widget.workspace-management preference value.

Other new features in Firefox 81 include the ability to save, manage, and auto-fill credit card information (US and Canada only), form filling support for PDF documents, improved picture-in-picture discoverability, more accessible audio and video controls for screen reader users, as well as improved video conferencing with Jitsi.

This release also makes it easier for users to see their bookmarks after importing them by automatically displaying the bookmarks toolbar once the import is finished and introduces a new colorful theme called Alpenglow.

Of course, there are also a bunch of new features for web developers, including support for JS (JavaScript) private fields, code folding in the DevTools console, CSS cross-fade, CSS overflow-clip, as well as HTML inert and inert sub-trees. It’s also now possible to open the .xml, .svg, and .webp files directly in Firefox.

If you can’t wait until tomorrow’s official launch, you can download Firefox 81 right now from Mozilla’s FTP servers for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Linux users will find 64-bit and 32-bit binaries that they can run without installing anything, as well as the source code.

Last updated 3 years ago

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