Mozilla Firefox 93.0 was officially released today. The release features AVIF image support and further security improvements.
The AV1 image format (AVIF) is an image file format for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format. It offers significant file size reduction compare to JPEG, PNG and WebP. Google Chrome added it support since version 85. By releasing v93.0, Firefox now has AVIF image support.
Some PDF files have interactive fields to fill in data. Since Firefox 83, the built-in PDF viewer supports filling fields such as text, check boxes, and radio buttons. In the new release, it adds more forms (XFA-based forms, used by multiple governments and banks) support.
To protect against potentially malicious or unsafe downloads, Firefox now blocks insecure HTTP downloads on a secure HTTPs web page, and blocks downloads in sandboxed iframes, unless the iframe is explicitly annotated with the allow-downloads attribute. Though, an option is available to select download anyway.
Other changes in Firefox 93 include:
- Automatically unload tabs on Windows, when system is running out of memory.
- Prompt to finish installation for macOS users first time running Firefox from a mounted .dmg file.
- Improved SmartBlock and new Referrer Tracking Protections.
- Fixed working with Orca screen reader.
- And various security fixes.
How to Get Firefox 93.0:
Ubuntu will build and publish the latest Firefox packages through the security & updates (main) repository in next few days (check the launchpad build page). The best choice is just wait and upgrade Firefox using “Software Updater” once available.
For the release note, as well as download link for the portable tarball that contains non-install executable file to launch Firefox, go to:
