Mozilla announces the availability of Firefox 103 The new browser

Mozilla announces the availability of Firefox 103. The new browser offers many valuable improvements for users and developers alike

Mozilla announces the availability of Firefox 103 The new browser
Mozilla has just released version 103 of its Firefox browser. As usual, this new version includes several improvements and fixes for users and developers.

Some improvements for users

At first glance, the foundation announces that the responsiveness of the Firefox browser on macOS has been improved, especially during periods of high CPU load. This was possible by going through a modern locking API. In addition to this improvement, the maintainers of the project point out that mandatory fields in PDF forms are now highlighted when filling out online forms. The Foundation provides support to ensure that these mandatory fields are not forgotten. In addition, there are only browser performance improvements on monitors with a refresh rate of 120 Hz and higher.

Added an enhancement to subtitles for those using the picture-in-picture feature. As a refresher, Picture-in-Picture (PiP) allows the user to place or hover a playing video on a web page and pin it anywhere on the screen. Starting with Firefox 100, the PiP feature supports subtitles and captions for videos from platforms like YouTube, Prime, Netflix, and websites that use videos in WebVTT format. In version 103 it is now possible to change the font size of video subtitles directly from the PiP window. And for users who use this feature frequently, you should know that the number of websites for which subtitles and captions are supported by PiP feature has been expanded. It is now possible to use subtitles and captions in picture-in-picture mode to watch videos on sites like Funimation, Dailymotion, Tubi, Hotstar and SonyLIV.

Mozilla announces the availability of Firefox 103 The new browser

As a further improvement, the tab toolbar buttons are now accessible with the Tab key, Shift+Tab key, and the arrow keys. To do this, you need to access the address bar using the Ctrl+L keys. From here, use the Tab and Shift+Tab keys to switch between the different main groups of buttons on the toolbar. When you reach the group you want, you can use the right and left arrow keys to switch between the buttons in that group. This way you can quickly and efficiently find the desired button. Then press the spacebar or enter key to activate the desired toolbar button once you reach it. To quickly return to the webpage from the toolbar, just press the F6 key. For convenience, you can also press the Menu key or Shift+F10 to access the button’s context menu, which is equivalent to right-clicking.

For Windows users, the Firefox team advises that Firefox’s Expand Text accessibility setting now affects all UI and content pages, and no longer just applies to system font sizes. Finally, a news that will please some Windows users is that it is now possible to easily access Firefox, which is now pinned to the Windows taskbar when installed on Windows 10 and 11. The team explains that this will also make Firefox start faster after .installation. But this could also be interpreted as a solution to further promote Firefox on Windows, knowing that the Microsoft team has developed several mechanisms to further promote its Edge browser to the detriment of others.

Much-needed fixes

Along with these improvements for users, this version 103 of Firefox has also received several fixes. Among other things, we have the following points:

  • non-breaking spaces are now preserved, preventing automatic line breaks when copying text from a form control;
  • Fixed WebGL performance issues with NVIDIA binary drivers over DMA buf on Linux;
  • Firefox startup could be significantly slowed down by handling local storage of web content. This had the greatest impact on users with platter drives and lots of local storage. This issue has also been fixed;
  • Some bugs in Firefox 102 showed evidence of memory corruption, and with enough effort, some of them could be exploited to run arbitrary code. The bugs marked as high severity bugs have been fixed.

Improvements that will delight developers

On the developer side we also have some changes.

At the CSS level, the background-filter property (which can be used to apply graphical effects such as blurring or color changes to the area behind an element) is now available by default. Also, the scroll snap-stop property is now available. With the values ​​always and normal of this property you can specify whether or not snap points should be skipped even when fast scrolling. Finally, support for the :modal pseudo-class was added. It selects all elements that are in a state in which they preclude any interaction with other elements until the interaction is rejected.

At the JavaScript level, error native types can now be serialized using the structured cloning algorithm. These include Error, EvalError, RangeError, ReferenceError, SyntaxError, TypeError, and URIError. Serialized AggregateError properties include name, message, cause, fileName, lineNumber, and columnNumber. For AggregateError, the Message, Name, Cause, and Errors properties are serialized.

At the API level, ReadableStream, WritableStream, and TransformStream are now transferable objects, meaning ownership can be transferred when sharing objects between a window and workers with postMessage or when using StructuralClone() to copy an object. However, after the transfer, the original object cannot be used. The caches, CacheStorage, and Cache APIs now require a trusted context. Properties/interfaces are undefined when used in an insecure context. Previously, the cache would return a CacheStorage that would throw an exception if used outside of a trusted context.

Several other changes are available in this latest Firefox 103 release.

Source: Firefox 103 Release Notes, Firefox 103 Fixes, Firefox 103 for Developers

And you?

NVIDIAs NeRF AI can reconstruct a 3D scene from a Have you tested Firefox 103? What do you think ?

NVIDIAs NeRF AI can reconstruct a 3D scene from a What are your comments on the improvements made to this new version of Firefox? Useful? Insufficient? Useless? Your opinion is expected.

See also

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