Mozilla Firefox 87.0 Download | TechSpot

Powered by a new, cutting-edge engine, Firefox has doubled its speed from last year. Because the Internet waits for no one.

Lean, mean speed machine

Firefox’s new engine uses 30% less memory than Chrome, so other programs won’t slow down during browsing. Now that’s a win-win.

Beautiful, intelligent design

Hello, gorgeous! Firefox’s sleek, new look comes loaded with intuitive features like in-browser screenshots and more.

New Tab

Search across multiple sites, view your top pages and discover new content.

Powerful privacy

You’re in control of your online information. Use Firefox Private Browsing to block ads with trackers for extra peace of mind… and pages that load up to 44% faster.

Browse for good

Firefox is backed by the non-profit Mozilla, who keeps the Internet healthier through programs that support tech education for girls, create trust around factual news, bring civility to the comments section and more.

Library

Enjoy everything you’ve saved to Firefox while browsing in one, easy place.

Extensions

Personalize Firefox with your favorite extras that help you do you.

Mobile Browsing

Access your bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across all your devices.

Shape Up Your Floats

CSS Shapes lets a floated element sculpt the flow of content around it beyond the classic rectangular bounding box we’ve been constrained to. For instance, in the above screenshot and linked demo, the text is wrapping to the shape of the grapes vs the image’s border. There are properties for basic shapes all the way up to complex polygons.

You can learn more in Josh Marinacci’s post on the new CSS Shapes tooling from yesterday.

Variable Fonts Are Here

No punny title, I’m just excited! OpenType Font Variations allow a single font file to contain multiple instances of the same font, encoding the differences between instances. In addition to being in one file, font creators can expose any number of variation axes that give developers fine-grained control on how a font is rendered. These can be standard variations like font weight (font weight 536 looks right? no problem!) or things that were never previously available via CSS (x-height! serif-size!). In addition to the candy-store possibilities for typography nerds, being able to serve a single file with multiple variants is a major page weight savings. Dan Callahan goes much deeper on the grooviness to be found and how Firefox makes it easy to tweak these new custom values.

Devtools Commands

The Developer Toolbar was an alternate command repl input in the Firefox Developer tools, apart from the Web Console. I say “was” because as of Firefox 62, it has been removed. It was always a bit hard to find and not as well-advertised as it could be, but did encapsulate some powerful commands. Most of these commands have been progressively migrated elsewhere in the devtools, and this is wrapped up in Firefox 62, so we’ve removed the toolbar altogether.

One of the last commands to be migrated is screenshot, which is a power-user version of the “take a screenshot” button available in the devtools UI. The screenshot command is now available as :screenshot in the Web Console. For example, have you ever needed a high-res screenshot of a page for print? You can specify a higher pixel density for a screenshot via the command: :screenshot –dpr 4

There are a bunch of other options as well, such as specifying output filenames, capture delays, and selector-cropped screenshots. Eric Meyer wrote a great primer on the power of :screenshot on his blog, and it will change your page capture game.

What’s New:

We are pleased to announce that Firefox 87 will introduce a stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy. From now on, by default, Firefox will trim path and query string information from referrer headers to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data.

Referrer headers and Referrer Policy

Browsers send the HTTP Referrer header (note: original specification name is ‘HTTP Referer’) to signal to a website which location “referred” the user to that website’s server. More precisely, browsers have traditionally sent the full URL of the referring document (typically the URL in the address bar) in the HTTP Referrer header with virtually every navigation or subresource (image, style, script) request. Websites can use referrer information for many fairly innocent uses, including analytics, logging, or for optimizing caching.

Unfortunately, the HTTP Referrer header often contains private user data: it can reveal which articles a user is reading on the referring website, or even include information on a user’s account on a website.

The introduction of the Referrer Policy in browsers in 2016-2018 allowed websites to gain more control over the referrer values on their site, and hence provided a mechanism to protect the privacy of their users. However, if a website does not set any kind of referrer policy, then web browsers have traditionally defaulted to using a policy of ‘no-referrer-when-downgrade’, which trims the referrer when navigating to a less secure destination (e.g., navigating from https: to http:) but otherwise sends the full URL including path, and query information of the originating document as the referrer.

A new Policy for an evolving Web

The ‘no-referrer-when-downgrade’ policy is a relic of the past web, when sensitive web browsing was thought to occur over HTTPS connections and as such should not leak information in HTTP requests. Today’s web looks much different: the web is on a path to becoming HTTPS-only, and browsers are taking steps to curtail information leakage across websites. It is time we change our default Referrer Policy in line with these new goals.

Firefox 87 new default Referrer Policy ‘strict-origin-when-cross-origin’ trimming user sensitive information like path and query string to protect privacy.

Starting with Firefox 87, we set the default Referrer Policy to ‘strict-origin-when-cross-origin’ which will trim user sensitive information accessible in the URL. As illustrated in the example above, this new stricter referrer policy will not only trim information for requests going from HTTPS to HTTP, but will also trim path and query information for all cross-origin requests. With that update Firefox will apply the new default Referrer Policy to all navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource (image, style, script) requests, thereby providing a significantly more private browsing experience.

If you are a Firefox user, you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this change. As soon as your Firefox auto-updates to version 87, the new default policy will be in effect for every website you visit. Yet another way that Firefox is improving your privacy, step by step!