mood Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 Mozilla Firefox 85 Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New The Mozilla Firefox 85 web browser is now available for download, ahead of its official unveiling on January 26th, for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows. Firefox 85 has been in development since mid-November 2020 when it entered the Nightly channel and landed in the beta channel on December 15th, when Mozilla released the Firefox 84 web browser as the last release to ship with support for Adobe’s now deprecated Flash Player plugin. Therefore, Firefox 85 is the first release of the popular open-source and cross-platform web browser to drop support for the Adobe Flash Player plugin. This means that you won’t be able to re-enable Flash support, especially because the Flash plugin has stopped loading Flash content since January 12th, 2021. Now that Flash is gone, let’s take a look at the new features as Firefox 85 comes with a major privacy feature called “Network partitioning,” which promises to improve your privacy while surfing the Web by partitioning the network resources instead of sharing them to eliminate cross-site tracking. Network partitioning is an ‘under the hood’ feature, which means that you won’t see any setting for it in the Preferences. Since website date will now be downloaded for each top-level domain, it will take a little longer to load websites, but Mozilla says the performance impact should be negligible for most users. Those of you who prefer better connectivity at the expense of losing privacy can disable the “Network partitioning” anti-tracking feature by setting the privacy.partition.network_state option in about:config to false. The option was available in Firefox 84, but now it’s turned on by default. Firefox 85 also makes it easier to keep track of your favorite websites by remembering your preferred location for saved bookmarks. In addition, the web browser now displays the bookmarks toolbar by default on new tabs and introduces a toolbar folder for quick and easy access to all of your bookmarks. Another new feature in Firefox 85 is the ability to remove all of your saved logins with a single mouse click from the built-in password manager rather than deleting each one individually via a new “Remove All Logins” option in the hamburger menu located on the right side of the about:logins page. Mozilla will officially release the Firefox 85 web browser on January 26th, 2021, when it will also become available to existing users via the built-in OTA update system (Mac and Windows only). If you can’t wait for Firefox 85 to land in the stable repos of your Linux distro, you can download the binaries from Mozilla’s FTP server right now. Source: Mozilla Firefox 85 Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mood Posted January 26, 2021 Author Share Posted January 26, 2021 Here is what is new and changed in Firefox 85.0 Mozilla will release Firefox 85.0 Stable and Firefox 78.7 ESR later today to the public (if you are reading this on January 26, 2021). The new Firefox versions are distributed via the web browser's built-in automatic updating system and as a direct download on Mozilla's main website. Stable and ESR releases go hand in hand with development build releases. Firefox Beta and Firefox Developer are upgraded to version 86, and Firefox Nightly to version 87. Firefox Android uses the same versioning scheme as Firefox Stable for the desktop, which means that it will be upgrade to Firefox 85.0. Check out the Firefox 84.0 release notes in case you missed them. Executive Summary Firefox 85.0 is the first major Firefox release of 2021. Flash support is removed from Firefox. Firefox 85 and Firefox 78.7 fix security issues. Firefox 85.0 download and update Most Firefox installations will be updated automatically once the new version is released officially thanks to the browser's built-in updating functionality. Firefox users may run a manual check for updates to speed up the updating process by selecting Menu > Help > About Firefox. The current version is displayed on the page that opens, and a check for updates is performed. Manual downloads are also available. The following pages list direct downloads for supported Firefox channels (will be available later on January 26, 2020) Firefox Stable download Firefox Beta download Nightly download Firefox ESR download Firefox for Android on Google Play New features and improvements Firefox remembers the previous bookmarks folder Firefox remembers the last folder that was used to store bookmarks in, and suggests it when the user wants to save another bookmark. Previously, the default folder was always the "Other Bookmarks" folder, even if users saved bookmarks regularly to other folders. Bookmarking has received a number of improvements. The "Other Bookmarks" folder, if it is not empty, is now displayed on the Bookmarks Bar of the browser. Additionally, it is possible to show the bookmarks bar only on the New Tab Page and not elsewhere. You can check out my full review of the new bookmarking features of Firefox 85 here. Better Firefox Home and New Tab controls Firefox 85 introduces improved Home and New Tab page controls. In particular, users get to select the defaults or any extension that could take over the Home or New Tab page of the browser. Previously, if users installed multiple extensions that did so, the last was picked by the browser with no option to change it (other than re-installing the preferred extension). Check out my full review of the new Home and New Tab page controls in Firefox. Other changes Improved privacy protection. Firefox protects against supercookies now in the new version. Flash support is removed. Firefox 85 supports importing passwords from the password managers KeePass and Bitwarden. Firefox improves privacy with its network partitioning feature. New option to disable the Tab-to-Search feature of Firefox. Firefox supports non-contiguous page ranges when printing. You may remove all saved logins in the Firefox password manager, instead of having to remove them one-by-one. Several Enterprise-related fixes, including: No longer possible to use "Save Link As" to download a blocked website (through Enterprise policies). Firefox can set itself as the default PDF viewer on Windows 7 again. Updates were sometimes erroneously. Firefox for Android Coming later. Developer Changes <link rel="preload"> is now enabled. Site owners may declare it to specify resources that should be loaded as early as possible by the browser. browsingData API is available on Android. It may be used, among other things, to remove certain types of browsing data, e.g. downloads or cookies. Known Issues The release notes list no known issues. Security updates / fixes Security updates are revealed after the official release of the web browser. You find the information published here after release. Outlook Recently Reviewed Firefox extensions easyGestures N is a user-friendly, mouse gesture navigation extension for Firefox Google Images Restored restores the classic Google Images web interface Manage your web shortcuts from a dual-pane interface with the Bookmarks Commander extension for Firefox and Chrome PopUpOFF update introduces automatic mode to remove on-screen annoyances Quick Commands is a Firefox extension that works like Vivaldi's shortcuts Save the title and URL of your tabs in different formats with the CopyTabTitleUrl extension for Firefox and Chrome Save webpages as an EPUB file with the Save as eBook extension for Firefox and Chrome Search and Manage tabs from multiple windows with ease using Tab Manager V2 for Firefox and Chrome Recent Firefox news and tips First look at Firefox's Multiple Picture-in-Picture video feature Firefox to support the printing of multiple pages per sheet How to use Firefox's Browsing History effectively What is the status of Firefox's client-side translation feature? Additional information / sources Firefox 85 release notes Add-on compatibility for Firefox 85 Firefox 85 for Developers Firefox for Enterprise 85 - release notes Firefox Security Advisories Firefox Release Schedule Source: Here is what is new and changed in Firefox 85.0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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