Firefox 78, a version with many improvements with WebRender support, uninstallers and more

Firefox 78, a version with many improvements with WebRender support, uninstallers and more

  The guys at Mozilla last week announced the release of Firefox 78, a release that brings several new features, bug fixes, changes, business improvements, and security fixes.  After this launch, a few hours later, a debug version of the browser was released which only resolved a problem with the search bar where the problem might be causing the installed search engines to not appear.

  But focusing on the most notable changes in this current branch, we can find for example the addition of WebRender improvements for Windows 10 users, error pages for all sites that do not support TLS 1.2, and a new update option in the Firefox uninstaller.

  Firefox 78 is also the last major release to support macOS versions 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11, with only those versions being supported by Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 78.x for next year.

  Key New Features of Firefox 78:

  In this new version, Windows users find the WebRender GPU-based 2D rendering engine implementation with Intel GPU support.

  While in general, in Firefox 78, we can find an option to update the installation in Firefox uninstaller.  This will allow users to first get the option to update their Firefox installation when they start the Firefox uninstall wizard.

  This will allow them to solve most uninstall issues without removing and reinstalling the web browser, making it easier to troubleshoot by clicking the Update button instead of Uninstall.

  Additionally, with this release, the screensaver will no longer interrupt WebRTC calls in Firefox, thus improving conference and video calls in Firefox.

  Firefox 78 is also our Extended Support (ESR) release, where changes made in the previous 10 releases will now be rolled out to ESR users.

  Another important change is that all DHE-based TLS ciphers are disabled by default.  To mitigate web compatibility issues related to disabling DHE-based TLS cipher suites, Firefox 78 allows two more AES-GCM SHA2-based cipher suites.

  Other changes that stand out are:

      Be able to check if any of your saved passwords were exposed in a data breach

      Correcting errors in configuring the quality of search results and improving search results texts based on the recommendations of our partners.

      The minimum system requirements for Linux have been updated.  Firefox now requires GNU libc 2.17, libstdc++ 4.8.1, and GTK+ 3.14 or later.

      The context menu (accessed by right-clicking on a tab) allows you to unclose multiple tabs with a single click, place Close tabs on the right, and close other tabs in a submenu.

      Enable support for client certificates stored on macOS and Windows by setting the security.osclientcerts.autoload experimental preference to true.

      New policies allow you to configure application administrators, disable picture in picture, and require a master password, which will be renamed to "master password" in future releases.

  How to install or update the new version of Firefox 78 on Linux?

  For those who wish to be able to install or update to this new version, they should follow the instructions we share below.

  If you are a user of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other Ubuntu derivatives, you can install or update this new version with the help of your browser's PPA.

  This can be added to the system by opening a terminal and executing the following command in it:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa: ubuntu-mozilla-security /ppa -y

  sudo apt-get update

  I did this now they just have to install with:

  sudo apt install firefox

  For users of Arch Linux and derivatives, simply run Terminal:

  sudo pacman -Syu

  or to install using:

  sudo pacman -S Firefox

  Finally, for those who prefer to use Snap packages, they will be able to install the new version as soon as it is released in the Snap repositories.

  But they can get the package directly from Mozilla's FTP.  With the help of the terminal by typing the following command:

  wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/78.0/snap/firefox-78.0.snap

  And to install the package we just write:

  sudo snap Install Firefox-78.0.snap

  Finally, you can get the browser with the latest installation method "Flatpak" added.  To do this, they must have support for this type of package.

  Installation is done by typing:

  Install Flatpak flathub org.mozilla.firefox

  For the rest of the Linux distributions, you can download the binary packages from the link below.