Mozilla has just released another major update for Firefox browser, this time bringing the app to version 82 on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
What’s very important to know is that Firefox 82 is now available as a manual download only, as Mozilla has only posted the official installers on its FTP servers. In other words, the automatic rollout through the built-in update system for existing Firefox users is yet to kick off, but it should also get the go-ahead tomorrow when the release is officially announced.
Oct 20, 2020 Firefox Release October 20, 2020 Version 82.0, first offered to Release channel users on October 20, 2020 We'd like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox.
And speaking of the official release, the Firefox 82 changelog isn’t available just yet, though we can already get a preview of what’s to come after this update thanks to the beta channel.
For example, in addition to the typical fixes that are part of every release, Mozilla has also refined the experience with the Picture-in-Picture mode, with its dedicated button now having a new look and position, all with the purpose of making everything easier to use.
- Oct 19, 2020 What's new in Firefox 82 Video playback improvements by enabling hardware decoding via DirectComposition. This also saves battery by reducing CPU and GPU usage. WebRender is now enabled on laptops with NVidia graphic cards with older drivers on WIndows.
- A portable version of this application is available: Portable Firefox runs on: Windows 10 32/64 bit Windows 8 32/64 bit Windows 7 32/64 bit file size: 52.1 MB filename: Firefox Setup 88.0.exe main.
Firefox 82 also comes with important fixes, including for the PDF experience and for printing bugs.
The fight against Chromium browsers
Moreover, the browser now displays a warning when it blocks a download due to security reasons. As we know already, browsers can automatically block the download of a specific file in case it considers it risky, so beginning with version 82, Firefox should make it clearer when this happens, regardless of the platform that you are using.
Firefox is currently the world’s third most-used desktop browser, after Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and is often considered the only worthy alternative to Chromium browsers that are already winning the market.
However, Mozilla has remained fully committed to further improving the browser, and earlier this year, the company switched to an accelerated release cycle, with major updates announced every four weeks.
Before we get to the Firefox 82 updates, I want to let you know that Philipp has passed the baton for these blog posts over to me. I plan to stick to the same format you know and hopefully love, but leave a comment if there’s anything you’d like to see change in future installments.
Language Packs
Starting with Firefox 82, language packs will be updated in tandem with Firefox updates. Users with an active language pack will no longer have to deal with the hassle of defaulting back to English while the language pack update is pending delivery.
Misc updates in Firefox 82
The cookie permission is no longer required in order to obtain the cookieStoreId for a tab, making it possible to identify container tabs without additional permissions.
The error message logged when a webRequest event listener is passed invalid match patterns in the urls value is now much easier to understand.
Firefox site isolation by default starting in Nightly 83
As mentioned earlier, we’re working on a big change to Firefox that isolates sites from one another. In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out an experiment to enable isolation by default for most Nightly users, starting in Firefox 83, with plans for a similar experiment on Beta by the end of the year.
For extensions that deal with screenshots, we’ve extended the captureTab and captureVisibleTab methods to enable capturing an arbitrary area of the page, outside the currently visible viewport. This should cover functionality previously enabled by the (long deprecated) drawWindow method, and you can find more details about new rect and scale options on the ImageDetails MDN page.
While we haven’t seen many reports of extension incompatibilities till now, Fission is a big architectural change to Firefox, and the web platform has many corner cases. You can help us find anything we missed by testing your extensions with Fission enabled, and reporting any issues on Bugzilla.
Thanks
Firefox 82.0.1
Thank you to Michael Goossens for his multiple contributions to this release.