Smaller Firefox 66 Improvements That You May Actually Miss

[The AchieVer]

Smaller Firefox 66 Improvements That You May Actually Miss 

 

Firefox 66 is now available for download on all supported platforms, but in addition to the new features that everyone notices after installing the browser, there are plenty of smaller refinements that need more time to discover.

 

This is why today we’re going to discuss about all these tweaks available in Firefox after the latest update and which can, just like the more significant improvements mentioned above, refine your experience with the app.

One of them is the smoother scrolling that users on all desktop platforms are getting with this update. Mozilla explains that Firefox 66 comes with scroll anchoring, which means that the site always remembers where you are, so if the browser loads some images or ads slower than the rest of the content, you aren’t automatically bumped back to the top of the page.

This is without a doubt welcome improvement for those who typically scroll websites before they are fully loaded, and it should enhance the reading experience regardless of the content on the page.

Firefox 66 also introduces tweaks to the search feature, and this time, there are two different improvements.

First and foremost, the browser now allows you to search tabs when you have plenty of them running at the same time. For example, you can use the address bar to search for tabs by simply entering the % (percentage) character before anything else, and you’ll then see a list of your active tabs. Entering the name of the website filters the list as you type.
 

 

 

Additionally, Mozilla has also added a search feature that can be enabled from the tab overflow menu, which shows up when you have a large number of tabs running in Firefox. The plus sign that’s typically placed in the tab bar now comes alongside a small down arrow, which when clicked, lets you search tabs. This feature takes you to the aforementioned address bar with the % character added by default.

The new version of Firefox also introduces search support for private browsing.

“When you open a new tab in Private Browsing, you’ll see a search bar with your default search engine – Google, Bing, Amazon.com, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Twitter or Wikipedia. You can set your default search engine when you go to Preferences, Search, then Default Search Engine,” Mozilla explains.

As I told you several weeks ago, Firefox 66 also introduces a change for extensions. In the previous versions of the browser, extension settings were stored in JSON files, but because Mozilla wanted the loading process to be faster and JSON files were a roadblock in this regard, the company now lets extensions use a Firefox database for storing all their settings. This means extensions load faster, which in turn means that websites themselves load faster too.
 

 

 

The updated browser introduces a new design for security warnings that is based on the checks performed by Firefox in the background, including for the security certificate. Mozilla says these warnings are now simpler and more straightforward, especially for beginners who may otherwise have a harder time to determine what they should do next.

Needless to say, there are plenty under-the-hood tweaks, like basic support for the macOS Touch Bar. The number of web content loading processes has been doubled from 4 to 8, while on Linux, the system title bar is hidden by default to match Gnome guidelines.

Overall, all these smaller touches are living proof that Firefox 66 isn’t only supposed to provide you with new capabilities, but also to refine the browsing experience overall. You can try them out by downloading the new Firefox version using the download links in this article.

 

 

 

 

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[The AchieVer]

Mozilla’s latest Firefox releases fix 22 vulnerabilities

 

The Mozilla Foundation yesterday issued version 66 of Firefox and 60.6 of Firefox ExtendedSupport Release (ESR), in the process patching 22 vulnerabilities between them, five of them critical.

Four of the five most severe flaws were found in both the standard and ESR versions of the web browser. This includes CVE-2019-9790, a use-after-free vulnerability that can occur when removing in-use DOM (Document Object Model) elements. Attackers can exploit this scenario, which was discovered by researcher Brandon Wieser, to intentionally cause a crash.

 

Two additional shared critical bugs were found in the IonMonkey JavaScript JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey. The first, a type confusion flaw (CVE-2019-9791), can enable arbitrary reading and writing of objects during an exploitable crash. The other, CVE-2019-9792, involves the leaking of a magic value to the running script, which can be leveraged to trigger memory corruption and ultimately a crash. Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero is credited with discovering both of these issues.

 

The final shared critical vulnerability consisted of a series of memory safety bugs (CVE-2019-9788) uncovered by Mozilla’s developers and community. Another set of memory safety bugs were also found only in the standard version of Firefox (CVE-2019-9789).

 

The previous versions of Firefox and Firefox ESR also shared an additional four high-level flaws, and one moderate-level bug. ESR also had one of its very own moderate vulnerabilities patched, while the latest standard version fixed an additional four-moderate level and four low-level bugs.