Unlike Google Chrome and many others, Mozilla doesn't use Chromium for Firefox. This is giving it a unique flexibility.
And that advantage is having the ability to try out new features of its own, as well as tweaking things that would be impractical or difficult to maintain for Chromium-based web browsers. This time, Mozilla has unleased Firefox 98, which packs features that include low-level performance changes.
For instance, in Firefox 98's release notes, Mozilla touts an "optimized download flow" that changes some of the browser’s long-standing behaviors.
For instance, Firefox 98 no-longer asks users what to do when a download is initiated. In older versions of the browser, a prompt appears asking users to choose an app to open the file, or save it to the disk instead. This time, with Firefox 98, the browser will automatically download items to the specified download location, without user input required.
This feature can be reverted.
Users can change it back by manually setting it up, and Firefox will adhere to it thereafter.
Users can also delete downloaded files directly from the downloads panel in Firefox 98. This saves users the process of having to open the panel, click 'open containing folder', find the file, and then delete it in a file manager.
Besides the said tweak, Firefox 98 also focuses on design updates.
Firefox on desktop platforms has supported custom backgrounds on the home page and on new tab pages. The browser has provided a massive library of themes users can choose.
This time, Firefox 98 brings the wallpaper feature to Android and iOS.
As a start, Firefox 98 populates it with the creations from Mozilla UX designer Melissa Chang, as well as additional images, like from Pixar’s Turning Red film, which Mozilla has been doing other brand integrations with over the past few months.
On iOS, Firefox also receives the ability to move the search bar to either the top or bottom of the display.
This design change follows what Safari on iOS has done.
You can enable Wayland support in Firefox manually. Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol, considered more secure than X11.
Beyond that, Firefox 98 also promotes its compatibility sidebar panel within the DevTools Inspector, making it officially available.
Another developer-facing change is Firefox 98 in disabling by defaults its deprecated WebVR API.
What Mozilla is doing here, is releasing smaller improvements, performance tweaks, and security enhancements.
Most of the changes are subtle.
But still, updates to browsers is a must, considering how fast the technologies that power the web evolve, and how quick malicious actors are adapting their strategies.
It's worth noting that in this release, users who have previously configured a default engine may notice that their default search engine has changed.
This can happen if Firefox 98 is unable to secure formal permission to continue including certain search engines in the browser.