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The Firefox 114 is now available for download ahead of its official unveiling on June 6th, 2023, as another worthy update for this popular open-source web browser used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions by default.
Highlights of Firefox 114 include a revamped DNS over HTTPS feature that has been implemented in Settings > Privacy & Security and it’s enabled by default. It now offers you three layers of protection: Default Protection, Increased Protection, and Max Protection.
“Default Protection” is the default setting, allowing Firefox to decide when to use secure DNS to protect your privacy. However, for stronger security, you can enable either the “Increased Protection” option, which lets you control when to use secure DNS, as well as to choose your favorite provider from either Cloudflare or NextDNS, or the “Max Protection” option, which tells Firefox to always use secure DNS over HTTPS.
The “Max Protection” option will also add a security risk warning before the use of your system DNS and always warns you if secure DNS isn’t available, which means that websites will not load or will have minimal functionality when this option is enabled.
Of course, you can also turn off DNS over HTTPS completely if you want to use your default DNS resolver, and it’s also now possible to manage exceptions, in the case when you want to use DNS over HTTPS but not on certain websites.
Another new feature in this release is the enablement of WebTransport by default to handle multiple use cases that are hard or impossible to handle without it. It’s an alternative for WebSockets and it comes in handy when using Firefox for gaming and live streaming. Mozilla says that WebTransport is built on top of HTTP3 and that they plan to add HTTP2 support in a future release.
Last but not least, Firefox 114 introduces the ability to search for bookmarks directly from the Bookmarks menu, support for restricting searches to your local browsing history by selecting the “Search history” option from the History, Library, or Application menu buttons, support for printing pages that use window.print() in Firefox for Android, as well as the ability to reorder the extensions listed in the Extensions panel.
For web developers, this release supports the –-compressed argument to the Copy as cURL feature in the Network panel, improves the Accessibility Inspector to accurately recognize all the ARIA roles, supports the CSS Cascading Level 4 supports() syntax for @import rules, supports ES Modules on DedicatedWorker and SharedWorker, and supports the infinity and NaN CSS constants inside the calc() function.
As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially announce Firefox 114 tomorrow, June 6th, 2023, when it will roll out as an OTA (Over-the-Air) update on supported platforms. However, you can download the final release right now from Mozilla’s download server if you like to use the official binaries.
Last updated 11 months ago
