New Update Mozilla Firefox 97.0 released: here is what is new

silversurfer

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Executive Summary​

  • Firefox 97.0 and Firefox 91.6 ESR are security updates.
  • Firefox supports Windows 11 style scrollbars.
  • Mozilla expires current colorway themes, adds new ones.

Other changes

  • Firefox supports the new scrollbar style on Windows 11 devices.
  • System font loading has been improved on Mac OS devices; this should improve the opening and switching to new tabs faster "in certain situations" according to Mozilla.
  • Linux users can no longer generate PostScript for printing in Linux. The option to use PostScript printers remains available.
 

silversurfer

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Mozilla released a security update to address a high severity privilege escalation vulnerability found in the Mozilla Maintenance Service.

The Mozilla Maintenance Service is an optional Firefox and Thunderbird service that makes application updates possible in the background. This provides Firefox users with a seamless updates experience where they are no longer required to click 'Yes' in the Windows User Account Control (UAC) dialog before updating their web browser or email client.

Mozilla fixed the privilege escalation security flaw tracked as CVE-2022-22753 today, with the release of Firefox 97.

Successful exploitation on unpatched systems can let attackers escalate their privileges to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account rights (the highest level of privileges on a Windows system).
"A Time-of-Check Time-of-Use bug existed in the Maintenance (Updater) Service that could be abused to grant Users write access to an arbitrary directory. This could have been used to escalate to SYSTEM access," Mozilla explained. "This bug only affects Firefox on Windows. Other operating systems are unaffected."

Mozilla also said that Firefox 97 addresses multiple memory safety bugs found by Mozilla developers and community in Firefox 96 and Firefox ESR 91.5.
"Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code," Mozilla added.
 

silversurfer

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Firefox on Linux has had a problem related to hardware video acceleration for a while. The issue can be replicated, when the preference for it is enabled, the browser may not render videos correctly or fail to play them. Many users have reported that the issue has been fixed in Firefox 97, except the solution is not enabled by default. [...]
This is another thing that went under the radar in the change-log, and applies to Windows users as well. Firefox 97 enables Project Fission by default. The site-isolation option, that was introduced last year, provides an extra layer of security to protect your data. The about:config preference for Fission is fission.autostart. This value is set to True. Here is the Bugzilla discussion related to it.
 

silversurfer

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Firefox Version 97.0.1, first offered to Release channel users on February 17, 2022
  • Fixed an issue where TikTok videos would fail to load when selected from a user's profile page (bug 1750973)
  • Fixed an issue which led to Picture-in-Picture mode being unable to be toggled on Hulu (bug 1753401)
  • Works around problems with WebRoot SecureAnywhere antivirus rendering Firefox unusable in some situations (bug 1752466)
  • Fixed an issue causing users to see the Restore Session screen unexpectedly when starting Firefox (bug 1749996)


 
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silversurfer

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The release of Firefox 97 changes that as it removed the option and enforced the use of the new Print Preview interface on all users.

Differences between both modes exist even though both share most features. The new Print Preview opens as an overlay on the existing page, the old one in a new separate window. As far as options are concerned, some, like the ability to jump to a specific page or scale presets, are missing in the new user interface.

Mozilla did improve the new Print Preview mode since the initial release. Several missing features, including printing a simplified version of the webpage or improved readability on smaller screens, were added. Readability of the webpage when displayed in the new Print Preview interface is still not ideal, especially on smaller displays or when the browser window is not maximized.

Additionally, the Simplified format does not work well sometimes, as you may end up with lots of white space on some pages. The following screenshot highlights the issue.

firefox print preview whitespace
 

silversurfer

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