The Mozilla team announced the release of Firefox 93, the latest version of its popular web browser. It includes two privacy improvements for users of Strict Tracking Protection and Private Browsing. Its SmartBlock 3.0 is a comprehensive feature that offers strong tracker blocking.
Improves SmartBlock
Firefox comes with the third iteration of SmartBlock, a mechanism that intelligently loads local, privacy-preserving alternatives to the blocked resources that behave h like the original ones to make sure that the website works properly. The latest version brings improved support for replacing the popular Google Analytics scripts. It also adds support for services like Optimizely, Criteo, Amazon TAM and various Google advertising scripts.
Firefox 93’s HTTP Referrer Protections allows browsers to ignore less restrictive referrer policies for cross-site requests, such as ‘no-referrer-when-downgrade’, ‘origin-when-cross-origin’, and ‘unsafe-url’ and therefore renders such privacy violations ineffective. It will trim the HTTP referrer for cross-site requests always, regardless of the website’s settings. Other notable features are:
- Firefox now supports the new AVIF image format, which is based on the modern and royalty free AV1 video codec. It offers significant bandwidth savings for sites compared to existing image formats. It also supports transparency and other advanced features.
- Firefox PDF viewer now supports filling more forms.
- When available system memory is critically low, Firefox on Windows will automatically unload tabs based on their last access time, memory usage, and other attributes. This should help reduce Firefox out-of-memory crashes. Switching to an unloaded tab automatically reloads it.
- To prevent session loss for macOS users who are running Firefox from a mounted .dmg file, they’ll now be prompted to finish installation. This permission prompt only appears the first time these users run Firefox on their computer.
- Firefox now blocks downloads that rely on insecure connections, protecting against potentially malicious or unsafe downloads.